Anne Taylor

Anne Taylor is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University specializing in cultural sociology, theory, and religion in travel, sport, and popular culture. Her research agenda explores the ways in which people find joy and belonging in life, including how they overcome structural and symbolic obstacles to do so. Taylor’s work is specifically focused on the interpretive agency of audiences in social performance to capture the lived realities of people whose political, religious, or cultural lives do not fit within existing sociological constructs. In an article published in Cultural Sociology (2022), Anne developed a theory of audience agency in the cultural pragmatics tradition of social performance theory via an illustration of Bernie Sanders’ political movement. This paper won the British Sociological Association’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence. A second paper published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2024), builds off of the first to articulate how audiences wrest interpretative authority away from actors through a case study of a Harry Potter podcast community’s changing relationship with J.K. Rowling. 

Using social performance theory and a multi-method qualitative research design, Taylor’s dissertation examines three cases from popular culture that would traditionally be considered “secular” and reveals how each have a search for religious meaning deep inside of them: a podcast hosted by two atheist “humanist chaplains” and the minister of Harvard Memorial Church that teaches listeners how to read Harry Potter as a “sacred” text; football coach Deion ‘Coach Prime’ Sanders’ takeover of the University of Colorado football program, and his use of luxury material culture and discourses of black Pentecostalism to perform charismatic self-possession; and how guides working for American travel writer Rick Steves in Europe perform travel as a “cosmopolitan revelation” that can cure Americans of their “ethnocentricity.” In addition to the dissertation, Anne has authored peer-reviewed research on this subject, including a paper on American travel writer Rick Steves published in Material Religion (2024), along with an essay in The Hedgehog Review, to demonstrate how travel is not only a consumptive practice but a project of moral formation.

Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Taylor earned a BA in History from Gordon College in Massachusetts in 2010, where she focused on ancient religion, medieval art and spiritual-political intersections. She then went on to earn a second BA in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2016, where she graduated summa cum laude with distinction for her honors thesis, “A Shared Revelation: Charismatic Communities and the Puritan Experiment in Early New England,” which was advised by sociologist Isaac Reed. In 2017, she received an Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and has been a Research Fellow at the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder since 2021. Prior to her academic work, Taylor worked for Bernie 2016 and Apple, Inc as a group facilitator and in the summer of 2021, she worked as a qualitative PhD research intern at Twitter.  

Publications

Taylor, Anne. 2024. “‘Keep on Travelin’: Rick Steves’ Europe and the Cure for American Ethnocentricity,” Material Religion. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2024.2365071

Taylor, Anne. 2024. “Harry Potter and the ‘Death of the Actor’: reimagining fusion in cultural pragmatics,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-024-00216-w

Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Anne Taylor. 2024. ““Ideology” and After: Reinscribing the Aesthetics of Symbolic Structure in Geertz,” Sociologica 18(1):7-23.

Taylor, Anne. 2022. “Audience Agency in Social Performance,” Cultural Sociology 16(1): 68-85.

Taylor, Anne. 2022. “What is Cultural Sociological Debate? A Review of Lyn Spillman’s What is Cultural Sociology? (2020, Cambridge: Polity Press)” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society.  This review was written in an exchange with the author, whose response can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-022-09428-9.