Faculty & Staff

Dr. Taylor joined the department in the fall of 2022, having previously served in faculty positions at Elon University (North Carolina) and Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles). Dr. Taylor teaches courses in political theory, with a special focus on critical democracy theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and theories of intersectional activism. Informed largely by early Women of Color feminism, Dr. Taylor’s research focuses on feminist theories of intersectional activism, feminist articulations of freedom, critical encounters with poststructuralism, and centering liberatory pedagogy in the political science classroom. She has articles forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, published in New Political Science, Polity, and Politics & Gender, and a book published with Duke University Press (December 2022), entitled Feminism in Coalition: Thinking with US Women of Color Feminism. Dr. Taylor received the Polity Prize for her 2019 article, “Is Liberalism Bad for Women: Reclaiming Susan Okin’s Feminist Democratic Thesis.” Her 2018 NPS article, “Coalition from the Inside Out: Women of Color Feminism and Politico-Ethical Coalition Politics” was spotlighted as part of New Political Science’s Limited-Term Open Access Critical Conversation, “Black Lives Matter and New Political Science: Scholarship Committed to Progressive Social Change” (August-December 31, 2020).

Dr. Taylor is currently working on a second single-authored book project that revisits the controversy surrounding the political cul-de-sac of deconstructive feminism emerging in the 1980s and 1990s in the US context. By contextualizing deconstructive feminism in relation to Women of Color feminism (which predates deconstructive feminism by at least two decades), the book sets the stage for an imagined site of generative feminist exchange that might help contemporary feminists to avoid the pitfalls of deconstructive feminism’s most vexing commitments (to deconstructing the category “women,” to anti-foundationalist feminism, to language as a starting and ending place for feminist analysis and intervention, and to anti-foundationalist group politics). Additionally, Dr. Taylor is at work on a co-edited book project exploring the role that ethnic studies pedagogy might play in political science classrooms oriented toward an “equity,” as opposed to a “diversity,” framework. Informed by critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks and centering critical inquiry, a normative commitment to social justice, and the move to “action,” this framework aims to infuse insights from critical and liberatory education into the political science classroom. Dr. Taylor and colleagues seek to not only make the case for why such a critical frame is needed, but to offer a range of practical “how-to” guides on incorporating an equity focus and balancing liberatory pedagogies of both love and discomfort in the political science classroom.