Anne Taylor is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. As a cultural theorist and sociologist of American religion and politics, her scholarship orbits around questions of interpretive agency, catalyzing change, and the ways people overcome obstacles to find joy and belonging in life. Via performance studies, as well as ethnographic and historical research in religion, media, and politics, her work theorizes the blurring boundaries between traditional religion and secular culture. She has published research in Cultural Sociology, Material Religion, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Sociologica, and pop essays in The New School’s Public Seminar and the Institute for Advanced Study in Culture’s The Hedgehog Review (at the University of Virginia). In 2023, she was awarded the British Sociological Association’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence for her article, “Audience Agency in Social Performance.” Dr. Taylor’s first book, tentatively titled A Cosmopolitan Revelation: From Tourism to Pilgrimage with Rick Steves’ Europe, studies travel as a project of moral formation through a qualitative study of American travel writer and longtime PBS television host, Rick Steves. She received her PhD in Sociology from Yale University in 2025.
