Rebecca Taylor is a doctoral candidate and part-time lecturer in the Department of Arts & Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University, where her research sits at the intersection of philosophy of education, aesthetics, and contemplative pedagogy. Her dissertation develops Re-presencing, a ritualised pedagogical framework for sustained, repeated aesthetic encounter with artworks across an expansive horizon of time, and considers what such practice can offer to questions of attention, self-formation, and meaning-making in an age of distraction. Her broader scholarly interests include aesthetic experience, latent affordances, attunement,…
Rebecca Taylor is a doctoral candidate and part-time lecturer in the Department of Arts & Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University, where her research sits at the intersection of philosophy of education, aesthetics, and contemplative pedagogy. Her dissertation develops Re-presencing, a ritualised pedagogical framework for sustained, repeated aesthetic encounter with artworks across an expansive horizon of time, and considers what such practice can offer to questions of attention, self-formation, and meaning-making in an age of distraction. Her broader scholarly interests include aesthetic experience, latent affordances, attunement, aesthetic literacy, and the long philosophical tradition of aesthetic askesis — aesthetic experience as a practice of self-cultivation.
Rebecca is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a 2026 Life Worth Living Program Fellow at Yale University. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Public Humanities, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Education & Culture, Journal of School and Society, Review of Metaphysics, and Contemporary Issues in Aesthetics. In addition, she has presented her work at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain at Oxford University, the Metaphysical Society of America at Yale University, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Los Angeles, The Art of Encounter at Notre Dame, the European Seminars in Philosophy of Education (ESPE) at the American University in Paris, and the International Congress of Aesthetics, among other venues.
Alongside her academic work, Rebecca brings more than two decades of leadership experience in the arts and culture sector, including roles at MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Trust; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This bridging of practice and philosophy informs her commitment to bringing rigorous philosophical inquiry into productive conversation with the institutional and pedagogical realities of museums, classrooms, and other sites of aesthetic encounter.
