Professor Yvette Taylor

Personal statement

Yvette Taylor acted as School of Education Research Director (2017-2019) and Deputy Head of School (2019), previously Professor in Social & Policy Studies and Head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research (2011-2015) and Senior Lecturer (Sociology), Newcastle University (2005-2011). Yvette was nominated for the THES Outstanding Leadership and Management Team (2013),  as Diversity Role Model (2013), for a Strathclyde Medal (2017) and a HaSS Teaching Excellence Award (2020).  A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Scottish Parliament Academic Fellow (2020-21), Yvette also received a RSE Personal Research Fellowship Queer Futures: Alternative Models for Social Justice (2023-2024). 

Yvette was Visiting Professor, Centre for Feminist Research, York University (2020), and at the Australian National University (2018). She has received several international fellowships including the Lillian Robinson Fellowship, Concordia University (2009) and a Fulbright Scholarship, Rutgers University (2010-2011). She has obtained a wide variety of funding, including an EU Norface (£1.4m) 3 year project 'Comparing Intersectional Life Course Inequalities amongst LGBTQI+ Citizens in Four European Counties'. Other projects include ESRC funded  ‘From the Coal Face to the Car Park? Gender and Class in the North East of England’ (2007-2009), ‘Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth’ (2011-2013) and British Academy mid-career fellowship ‘Critical Terrain: Dividing Lines and Lives’ (2013-2014). 

Yvette has published five  sole-authored books based on funded research: Working-class Lesbian Life (2007); Lesbian and Gay Parenting (2009); Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (2012); Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth (2015);  Working-Class Queers. Time, Place & Politics  (Pluto, 2023) and co-authored Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education: Interrupting Career Categories (2020). 

Edited titles include Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education (2023); Queer Sharing in the Marketized University (2022); The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education (2022);  Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University (2018); Queering Religion, Religious Queers (2014). Yvette edits the Palgrave Gender and Education Series and co-edits the Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities Series and is on the Editorial Boards of Gender and Education, Social and Cultural Geography, Sexualities (Sociology 2011-2016). She set up the Strathclyde Feminist Research Network Seminar Series in 2016, since co-organized colleagues. 

Yvette teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes including the MEd Education Studies, the MSc Applied Gender Studies and delivers CLPL 'Feminist Classrooms' to practitioners.  Yvette mentors a variety of early career researchers, and acts as named mentor on fellowships including ESRC postdocts, Marie Curie, Leverhulme, Fulbright Distinguished Teacher schemes, and Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) funded postdoc (2021-2022) 'International Trans and Intersex Activist Relationships'. Yvette supervises across areas of class, disability, feminism, gender, higher education, religion, sexuality, widening participation - and currently supervises the following PhDs, including ESRC and Research Excellence funded:

Cared Experienced Students

Queer, Disability & Higher Education 

Queer Parenting & Schooling

Student Estrangement 

Social class and the 'Bottom Reading Group'

Gender Performance in Rural Secondary School

Immigrant and Refuge Students

Hijra Community in India

Queer Teachers

Negotiations of Sexual Consent

Trans Lives & Social Media