Elizabeth Scala was having trouble, trouble, trouble.
It was 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Scala, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, had tried several themes, including the Harry Potter series, to engage students in a course she’s been teaching for years, a freshman honors seminar focused on critical reading and analysis. But things weren’t clicking.
Then Taylor Swift took the course to places it’d never been.
The pop star had just re-released one of her albums, Red (Taylor’s Version), and Scala was listening at home with her daughter. “All of the sudden, it hits me like a ton of bricks,” she said. “Taylor Swift is the way to teach this course to a new audience.”
The Swiftified class hit the course catalog in the fall of 2022. Now, Scala said, she feels as if it’ll never go out of style: “The demand is huge.”
All of the sudden, it hits me like a ton of bricks. Taylor Swift is the way to teach this course to a new audience.
Over the past year, college courses centered on Taylor Swift have cropped up in a range of disciplines: music, of course, but also literature, sociology, and even intellectual-property law. The courses took off as she released her 10th studio record, Midnights, continued re-recording her first six albums, and set off on “The Eras Tour,” a defining cultural event of modern times.
This isn’t the first time higher ed has crossed paths with Swift: She received an honorary doctorate from New York University and delivered its commencement address in 2022.
The haters gonna hate — questioning the validity of embracing the pop star as a serious academic pursuit. But professors who teach these courses view Swift’s celebrity as a gateway to get students engaged in the classroom. Some also argue there’s merit in studying the sweeping influence of the singer herself.
Scala, a scholar of medieval literature such as Chaucer, said she gets questions about teaching Swift’s songwriting alongside Shakespeare’s verses. Is she holding them in the same esteem?
“I can’t make her as good as Shakespeare,” she said. But that’s not the purpose of the course.
“Students are willing to spend the time listening to her albums over and over and over again,” Scala said. “That willingness to patiently take something apart and think about it, historicize it, research it” is an essential part of learning. Even, she said, “if I have to use Taylor Swift’s music to get them to see that that is a valuable thing to do.”
Taylor, the Course
Brian L. Donovan, like many professors, is used to students’ packing up in the final minutes of class. “They cannot wait to get out the door,” he said.
That changed when Donovan, a professor of sociology, started teaching “The Sociology of Taylor Swift,” a one-credit honors seminar at the University of Kansas. Now, he said, he just about has to herd students out of the room because they want to continue the discussion.
Donovan taught the seminar last fall for the first time, and it had 11 students. But he said there’s been so much demand that he’ll also teach it as a larger course, with 30 to 40 students, in the fall of 2024.
All of the students know the case study so well that we could immediately get to the theoretical idea or concept that was on tap for the week.
He started teaching about Swift because his students were already spending so much time talking about her. At first, he worried the class would get sidetracked by all the news coming out about Swift — awards, tour updates, relationships, potential new albums — but it didn’t. Plus, students actually did the readings. “That was delightful,” he said.
Donovan’s syllabus, which he shared with The Chronicle, is organized into 13 topics — Swift’s favorite number — that focus on how Swift and Swiftiedom are a “mirrorball” for society. Course units include how the star has shaped the music industry and popular culture, her political turn, race and gender, cultural capital and consumption, and fan culture.
In his teaching, Donovan typically introduces a concept, then follows it up with a case study to help students translate and apply it to the real world. But those don’t always land with students, he said; some are out of date or don’t resonate. With Swift, Donovan said, he flipped that model.
“All of the students know the case study so well that we could immediately get to the theoretical idea or concept that was on tap for the week,” he said. “They are all kind of subject experts on Taylor Swift, and then it was just the task of getting them to see how her career, her celebrity, and her fandom reflect outward to broader themes in American society.”
Scala said her Swift-themed critical-reading seminar at UT-Austin gives students a jumping-off point to explore more writers, poets, and stories.
Scala will soon transform the course into a larger lecture, an introduction to literary studies. She hopes it’ll get students interested in studying English, one of many humanities fields that have struggled with declining student interest.
“It’s talking about Taylor Swift and this music that we all like and this artist, but it’s also a way of kind of reflecting back our own lived experiences,” said Phoebe E. Hughes, a musicology lecturer who has taught her own Swift-themed course at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York. “And popular culture offers us a really important focal point for that type of inquiry and way of thinking for students.”
Taylor, the Research Subject
Some scholars say Swift is also worth studying all on her own. Stephanie Burt, a professor of English who is teaching a Swift course at Harvard University this spring, argues that the songwriter has a place among the literary greats, such as Willa Cather and William Wordsworth, who are also on the reading list.
Burt, a poetry critic, is leading “Taylor Swift and Her World,” a literature course with almost 300 students enrolled thus far. The interest was so vast that she posted a request on X this month for more teaching assistants.
Some professors are even producing scholarship on Swift. Donovan, a cultural sociologist, is researching and writing a book on Swiftie-fandom culture, he told The Kansas City Star. He put a call out last May on TikTok, prompting legions of Swifties to share their connections to the singer and one another.
Hughes focuses much of her research on Swift, including her music, her fandom, and her place in pop culture at large. Hughes is working on a book project about how Swift interacts with social and feminist movements — examining, for instance, when and how Swift makes statements about a cause through her music and tour concerts.
Hughes said her course and studies reflect a “robust” pop-culture discipline in higher ed. “I think it’s one site where this kind of academic, higher-ed space could maybe touch broader society, kind of get outside of that academic bubble, because the material is relatable, or people already have knowledge about it,” Hughes said.
In literature, Scala and Burt said, all the writers most commonly studied were once part of popular culture; it’s just been a couple of hundred years.
Another English professor, Ben Parker of Brown University, disputed that comparison in a Chronicle essay this month: “The category of cultural ‘prestige,’ as applied either to pop music or to academic study in the 21st century, is incommensurable with the cultural world of Shakespeare.”
Some professors aren’t keen on making an academic subject out of a pop icon. “My own response on reading about Burt’s course was to tear at my powdered wig and bemoan that Harvard students will graduate having learned more about Taylor Swift than Jonathan Swift,” Parker wrote. While he believes that pop culture has a place in modern literature departments, he took issue with Burt’s use of Swift “as a kind of lure” to persuade students to enroll.
Still, Scala said many colleagues are excited that it’s bringing legions of Swifties into their majors. Scala runs an Instagram account, @swiftieprof, that aims to engage an even wider audience with the study of English literature.
The most vocal critics are the online trolls.
Donovan, who runs a TikTok account where he discusses his course content, said he gets comments calling his class useless and saying it’s an example of the declining value of higher ed.
Burt has drawn online criticism saying that teaching Swift is beneath her and the study of English, or that a college such as Harvard shouldn’t teach about such trivial topics.
One user on X called Burt’s course “the cherry on the cake of Harvard’s decline.”
But Burt just shakes it off.
