Universities are responding to the Taylor Swift pandemonium with new courses about her stardom.
Starting in the Spring of 2024, students at Harvard University and the University of Florida will be able to take courses focused on studying Swift’s impact on culture.
Harvard’s English department is offering a class called “Taylor Swift and Her World,” where instructor Stephanie Burt will unpack Swift’s “fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood, and appropriation” Harvard states.
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Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images | US singer Taylor Swift delivers the commencement address to New Yor University graduates, in New York on May 18, 2022.
“We will learn how to think about illicit affairs and hoaxes, champagne problems, and incomplete closure,” the course description reads, referring to a few song titles from Swift’s albums Folklore and Evermore.
At UF, pupils can take “Musical Storytelling with Taylor Swift and Other Iconic Female Artists” in Spring 2024 with instructor Melina Jimenez. The one-credit class will spend 13 weeks analyzing Swift’s discography while drawing parallels between her and other female powerhouses like Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, and Dolly Parton, the course description states.
The courses are only offered to enrolled university students.
However, Harvard and UF aren’t the first schools to study the art of Taylor Swift. In early 2022, NYU launched a Swift-focused course taught by Rolling Stone writer Brittany Spanos.
Since then, other schools including the University of Texas, Arizona State University, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley have offered classes dedicated to the artist, according to Billboard.
Apart from Swift’s impact on culture – and, apparently, the education system – she’s also boosting the economy. The U.S. leg of her Era Tour, which ran from March to October 2023, brought in $5 billion in consumer spending, online research group QuestionsPro found.
“If Taylor Swift were an economy, she’d be bigger than 50 countries; if she was a corporation, her net promoter score would make her the fourth-most-admired brand, and her loyalty numbers mimic those of subjects to a royal crown,” said Dan Fleetwood, president of QuestionPro Research and Insights. “It’s all a testament to her focus on the fan experience.”
