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SAR RESEARCHERSFormer Staff Scholars

Nicole Taylor

Nicole Taylor

Director of Scholar Programs — 2011 to 2016

Dr. Nicole Taylor brought an academic background that spans the social sciences and humanities as well as prior experience as an applied researcher and administrator in nonprofit organizations to her position as director of Scholar Programs at the School for Advanced Research. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English and taught high school and college literature and writing courses before pursing a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Arizona.

After graduate school, Dr. Taylor worked in the nonprofit sector conducting research in the areas of substance abuse, education and poverty, childhood obesity, and school climate. During this time, she participated in all aspects of nonprofit work, including capacity building, community needs assessments, grant writing, program planning, and evaluation. This experience not only prepared Dr. Taylor for her administrative role at SAR, but it also provided insight into policy implications of school-based behavioral health research, which informs her scholarly work on gender, body image, and obesity among southern Arizona youth.

Her book Schooled on Fat: What Teens Tell Us about Gender, Body Image, and Obesity was published by Routledge in the spring of 2016 as part of its Innovative Ethnographies Series. It takes the reader into the everyday lives of teens as they navigated fraught realities of body image during a time of heightened fat stigma and within a school environment that set them up for failure.

She is currently an associate professor of anthropology at Texas State University.

Publications include:

Taylor, N. L., & Nicther, M. (2017). Body Image. In J. A. Brett and J. Chrzan (Eds.), Research Methods in the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books.

Merrill, M. L., Taylor, N. L., Martin, A. J., Maxim, L. A., D’Ambrosio, R., Gabriel, R. M., Wendt, S. J, Mannix, D., & Wells, M. E. (2012). A mixed-method exploration of functioning in Safe Schools/Healthy Students partnerships. Evaluation and Program Planning. 35(2), 280-286.

Taylor, N. L. (2011). Negotiating popular obesity discourses in adolescence: School food, personal responsibility, and gendered food consumption behaviors. Food, Culture & Society. 14(4), 587-606.

Taylor, N. L. (2011). “Guys, she’s humongous!” Gender and weight-based teasing in adolescence. Journal of Adolescent Research. 26(2), 178-199.

Nicther, M., & Taylor, N. L. (2011). Dieting. In D. Southerton (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, Volume 1 (pp. 451-53). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.