Career
She is currently Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the Environmental Policy and Culture Program. Areas of focus include women"s studies in religion, religion and ecology, and religion and American culture. Taylor has held numerous fellowships, including the Andrew West. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, a Wabash Center Fellowship, and a Louisville Institute Fellowship.
Foreign the 2008-2009 school year, she held the Senior Research Fellowship at the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
In "What If Religions Had Ecologies?: The Case for Reinhabiting Religious Studies" (Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, Summer 2007), Taylor argues that meaningful connections need to be forged between the literary realm of ecocriticism and religious studies, and more attention needs to be paid to the natural history of the physical environments that religious communities inhabit and to how those communities shape and are in turn shaped by those environments. When physical environments are considered as integral parts of academic religious inquiry and no longer rendered invisible or relegated to mere ‘backdrops’ for the larger human drama, contends Taylor, scholars will be able to provide a more nuanced sense of religion as it is truly lived in context.
Taylor continues to theorize the concept of "spiritual ecology" in her work. The author currently has two books in process: Eternally Green: American Religion and the Ecology of Death, which looks at the green burial movement, and Eco-Prophecy: Religious Responses to Global Climate Change.