Christopher Taylor holds a PhD in Comparative Thought and Literature from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Philosophy from Yale University. Before joining the University Writing Program in 2025, he was a visiting research fellow in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Taylor is a scholar of the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of artificial (i.e., human-constructed) life, understood as both concrete scientific, technological, and media practice and abstract conceptual apparatus. His current book project, Animated Otherwise: A Genealogy of Artificial Life in Modern Japan, traces the transwar history and contemporary afterlives of Japanese modernists’ engagements with—and proposed alternatives to—the visions of nature, human nature, and technological modernity expressed in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. and embodied in the figure of the robotic artificial human.
His ongoing research and teaching interests span Japanese literature, media, and visual culture, global animation and special effects film history, modernist studies, modernity studies, aesthetics, affect, and translation studies. His screen studies courses interrogate how film, animation, and adjacent media forms have been used as tools for two sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic functions: as spectacular, affective media that suspend disbelief and mobilize wonder, and as apparatuses of recording that afford privileged epistemic access to whatever passes under the camera’s mechanical gaze.
He has presented at conferences in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and was a guest speaker at the 2025 Osaka World Expo. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Blakemore Foundation (2020–2021), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2021–2022), and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (2023–2024). He is currently co-chair of the Animated Media Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
- Media theory and history
- Animation and new media
- Japanese literature, film, and visual culture
- History, philosophy, and aesthetics of artificial life
“The Future of Narrative and Embodiment” panel , Osaka Expo 2025 (April 29, 2025).