In recent years, the traditional college course has experienced a significant cultural shift.
College courses about pop sensations like Beyoncé or Rihanna have become somewhat common place, with classes using the musical powerhouses to launch a discourse on race, culture and even Black feminism. Additionally, literature classes, which often focus on 18th century poets, are making the leap into pop culture, thanks to Taylor Swift.
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In less than two years, Swift has become a popular subject at various colleges and universities, where students are learning about her song writing and lyricism. Most notably, Harvard is set to launch a spring course called, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” in which students will get to study Swift alongside the famous works of contemporary literature like William Wordsworth and Shakespeare.
Students, who've enrolled or taken the Taylor Swift-inspired courses, are applauding professors for making core classes more relatable and centered on current events instead of focused on historical pieces of literature or "traditional" works.
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One of those students is Malia Palmer, 20, a sophomore at University of Texas at Austin, studying sociology, who took one of the first Taylor courses in 2022, “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” before it became a trend.
In an interview with TODAY.com, Palmer speaks on her appreciation for the course which she says didn't center solely on Sylvia Plath and other type of "stodgy" literature she'd grown accustomed to.
She also talks about how taking an English course, which used Swift as a subject for lectures when studying classic works like Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," made class more interesting.
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Palmer says Swift's 2008 hit track "Love Story," was studied in relation to the romantic playwright, given her clear reference to the characters in the song.
With Swift's emblematic catalogue of music, it's not surprising that the singer has become the subject matter at major universities like Rice, NYU, and Stanford.
At Stanford, the course called "The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling With Taylor Swift through the Eras," will be taught by second-year undergraduate Ava Jeffs in the spring.
Although Jeff, who is majoring in computer science, is not a professor, her love of Swift prompted her to create a syllabus based on the vocalist so that she could teach other students about the value of her songs in relation to literary works. She says that her interest in introducing Swift to the classroom stemmed from her desire to "challenge" student perceptions of classic literature.
Why are so many colleges offering Taylor courses?
Professor Elizabeth Scala, who teaches English at the University of Texas at Austin talks about her course titled “The Taylor Swift Songbook” that launched in Fall 2022.
Before Taylor courses became popular, Scala recounts her personal experience creating the class, which was taught to first-year college students.
The class, which was first teased as a "secret Harry Potter course," that focused on British literature and medieval literary traditions within J.K. Rowling's popular novels, eventually evolved into a seminar on Swift after Scala discussed Taylor's "All Too Well" with her daughter. This is when she says she discovered that Swift's song had a strong connection to historic literature.
"I want to say the semester before I taught the course I was getting ready to order my books and thought, 'what would it be like if I flipped that Harry Potter course into a Taylor Swift course?'" Scala says.
During an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, Swift commented on the metaphors within her song "All Too Well."
The singer stated that the scarf in the 2021 "All Too Well" music video "is a metaphor and we turned it red because red is a very important color in this album, which is called 'Red.'"
As for Scala's thoughts on why so many colleges are jumping on the Swiftie bandwagon, she says, Taylor Swift is both the "hook" and "hard sell" for professors to reignite student's interest in classic literature.
Scala also acknowledges Harvard's recent Taylor Swift addition to its course offerings. She lightheartedly quips, “Now Harvard has stuck its nose in the soup and everybody’s interested. I'm like, guess what people, I was first." However, Scala, who received her PhD from the Harvard, only has good things to say about her former alma mater.
"I love that there are so many courses" centered on Swift, she says before adding that all the courses "uniquely differ."
At Rice University, undergraduate student, Katherine Jeng, a junior studying English and Social Policy Analysis, teaches a 1-credit Swiftie course called "Miss Americana: The Evolution and Lyrics of Taylor Swift."
The class offered to Rice undergraduates is taught in “chronological order” of Swift’s albums from her debut released in 2006 to her most recent album, “Midnights,” released in 2022, Jeng explains.
Like Scala, she too points out the singer's relevance and notes the criticism that comes with starting a course centered on the singer. "Some people believe that her lyrics are just pop hits and that there’s not really any depth to them," Jeng says.
She continues, “I wanted to challenge this notion and highlight her songwriting abilities, while also getting to talk about my favorite artist."
What do students think of the courses?
Students at Rice University and University of Texas at Austin (UT) are also weighing in on what they love about these Swift-inspired courses and their assignments.
Anna Grace Holloway, 20, is a philosophy and government double major in the Liberal Arts honors program at UT. The sophomore undergraduate talks about her "newfound appreciation" for Swift following Professor Scala's course.
"I always knew that she was a great songwriter," but was "most surprised to see the parallels" between both Swift's work and classic literature.
She recalls a noteworthy assignment where the class watched the famous Alfred Hitchcock film, "Rebecca," based on the 1938 Gothic novel by Daphne Du Maurier. The class compared it to Swift's 2020 "Evermore" track, "Tolerate It," which tells a similar story of tragic love, she explains.
In an interview with Apple Music, Swift explained that "Tolerate It" was largely inspired by “Rebecca."
“I was thinking, ‘Wow, her husband just tolerates her. She’s doing all these things and she’s trying so hard and she’s trying to impress him, and he’s just tolerating her the whole time,’” she said. “There was a part of me that was relating to that, because at some point in my life, I felt that way.”
For Holloway the course was especially significant, because out of the 17 students who enrolled in the class at the time of its 2022 launch, Swift's early co-writer, Liz Rose, signed on to teach a session on songwriting. Rose is responsible for penning tracks such as "White Horse" and "You Belong with Me."
The class also got to make "friendship bracelets for [Swift's] "Eras" tour concerts" to conclude a successful semester, and both Holloway and Palmer even got to sport them while attending concerts in Denver and Houston.
Scala herself even got in on the bracelet making fun.
As more classes about the singer continue to pop up, the consensus is clear: Taylor Swift is reawakening curiosity in the classroom. Whether she's being compared to literary works of art, studied as a tool used in politics or to boost the economy, professors and students acknowledge that Swift is a force to be reckoned with.
19-year old Isabella Campos, a sophomore at Rice University studying English and anthropology, agrees, adding that "Regardless of if you’re a huge Swiftie, you can still take a step back and look objectively at her songwriting and lyricism to find something compelling there."
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
