Taylor Swift once expressed that if she weren’t a record-breaking, hit-making, three-time-Grammy-album-of-the-year-winning superstar (those are our adjectives, not hers), she would have chosen to return to the classroom.
“I would have gone to college, and I would probably be involved with a form of business where words and ideas are at the forefront,” she told GQ in 2015. “Such as marketing.”
While she may be too famous to enroll in a business class for a marketing degree, Taylor Swift’s music and persona are now subjects of academic scrutiny on college campuses, catering to both Swifties and the general student population.
Universities across the United States, including prestigious institutions like Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin, and Stanford, have introduced courses delving into Swift’s body of work and the extensive discourse surrounding her career and life spanning over a decade. This recognition is a fitting tribute to the singer-songwriter, whose fame and success have reached new heights in 2023.
In the current semester at Arizona State, students can enroll in a course exploring the psychology of Swift’s songs. Meanwhile, at the University of Florida, honors students will delve into the role of women in popular music, starting with Swift and progressing to iconic figures like Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin.
At UC Berkeley, Swift serves as the muse for a business course focused on artistic entrepreneurship, celebrating her meticulous image crafting and her efforts to assert ownership over her work. Furthermore, her prowess as a wordsmith is showcased in numerous English classes that draw parallels between her work and that of literary giants, ranging from Shakespeare to Yeats.
Taylor Swift, in this academic context, acts as something of an academic Trojan horse — her name in a course description grabs immediate attention, but instructors leverage her global fame to make potentially complex subjects more engaging, framing them through the lens of arguably the most famous woman on Earth, or at the very least, Time’s “Person of the Year” for 2023.”
“(Swift) gives us this lever to talk about what we’re otherwise having more difficulty convincing people is important,” said Elizabeth Scala, a professor of medieval romance, historiography and culture at the University of Texas at Austin, who next semester will reprise her literary studies course that uses Swift’s songbook as one of its primary texts.
The student reception has been overwhelmingly positive: Melina Jimenez, a senior lecturer set to teach the upcoming Swift course at the University of Florida, revealed that her class, limited to 15 students, reached full capacity within seconds of registration opening.
According to instructors familiar with teaching Swift’s work, her music has a unique ability to accomplish what many academics have struggled with in the past — genuinely inspire students to be enthusiastic about learning. Additionally, drawing comparisons between Chaucer’s work and one of Swift’s catchy tunes makes writing an essay about Chaucer a much more accessible task.
Swift’s appeal to students has made classes engaging and exciting
Prior to instructing their individual classes on Swift, the singer-songwriter had made several inroads into the lives of their teachers: Scala’s younger daughter, a devoted fan of Swift, questions her mother about her top “Taylor’s Version” vault songs. Since Jimenez is not a Swiftie, she was unable to understand the conversations between her students that focused on Swift.
“She’s the last monoculture,” Scala said. “Everybody can come together and enjoy (her music). It’s both highly specific and biographical but also really, really relatable to anyone.”
Scala’s literary studies class used to get students hooked through J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular “Harry Potter” series, but she was growing bored with the curriculum she’d built around the boy who lived. Then, in late 2021, Scala along with millions watched the premiere of Swift’s “All Too Well” short film, depicting a relationship gone sour set to the new, lengthier version of a song from Swift’s album “Red.”
While listening to “All Too Well,” Scala started, nearly inadvertently, drawing a curriculum around the song. She heard in its lyrics comparisons to the works of Homer. She found Swift playing with different literary forms and traditions. Even the debate between which version of the song was the true iteration felt like its own lesson.
“That’s when the popcorn went off in my head,” Scala said.
She consulted her daughter, a dedicated Swiftie, to ensure that the Swift-centric course would captivate fans as much as it did her, an academic. Reassuringly, her daughter predicted that the course would likely become one of the most popular offerings at the University of Texas at Austin.
The inaugural edition of her Swift course, titled ‘The Taylor Swift Songbook,’ was introduced in 2022. It marked one of the pioneering Swift-themed classes at a major university, alongside New York University’s exploration of the ‘appeal and aversions’ of Swift, led by Rolling Stone journalist Brittany Spanos.
Suddenly, Scala’s students discovered new layers of appreciation for ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ a Shakespearean play often encountered with weariness by high schoolers. By framing Romeo and Juliet’s initial encounter as a song, likening their exchange of flowery quatrains to crafting a sonnet, Scala breathed new life into the centuries-old text that had previously seemed dull to her students. Swift’s incorporation of Shakespeare’s doomed lovers into one of her early popular songs also contributed to their renewed interest.
Jimenez’s decision to offer her course at UF is driven by a desire to delve into the intense idolatry surrounding Swift. Swift’s fame has soared since her debut, defying critics who thought ‘1989’ marked her artistic peak. The subsequent releases of ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore,’ featuring collaborations with respected indie artists, followed by ‘Taylor’s Versions’ and ‘Midnights,’ further solidified her influence. This year, Swift embarked on the record-breaking Eras Tour, the highest-grossing concert tour in history. Simultaneously, she documented the tour for a film version, creating yet another cultural phenomenon.
While Jimenez may not have been a lifelong Swiftie like many of her students, she recognized the cultural impact of women artists who paved the way for Swift. Figures like Parton, Franklin, and Billie Holiday are acknowledged as feminist icons who have indelibly shaped their industry and art.
“More than anything else, selfishly, I want to learn what makes Swift so interesting for young people,” Jimenez said. “But I also want to find connections with other women artists who have stirred similar feelings with older generations, and hopefully introduce (them to) students (who) hadn’t given (them) much thought because they hadn’t spent the same time with their lyrics.”
The classes ask hard questions about Swift, too
While these Swift-centric classes attract substantial enrollment, often comprising Swifties as both students and instructors, they aren’t centered around idol worship.
Katherine Jeng, a student at Rice University, who taught the one-credit class ‘Miss Americana: The Evolution and Lyrics of Taylor Swift’ this semester, emphasized the importance of acknowledging criticisms of Taylor Swift in her curriculum. This includes addressing accusations of ‘rainbow capitalism’—publicly supporting the LGBTQ community for financial gain—on the album ‘Lover,’ as well as scrutiny for remaining publicly apolitical until after the 2016 election.
Jeng aimed to facilitate these discussions within the classroom, mirroring the conversations taking place among her fellow students outside. The goal was to create an environment that encourages students to recognize that it’s acceptable to admire a pop culture icon who, like everyone, is a work-in-progress.
“I wanted to make sure we allowed for space to recognize how she’s learning and growing as a person and as a celebrity,” she said.
Taking Swift seriously, flaws and all, has been a major element of her public reappraisal since “Reputation,” her 2017 album recorded after a public flap with Kanye West and his then-wife Kim Kardashian. She’s been a critical darling throughout her career, but her public relationships have often outshone whatever art she’s making. Her early material’s focus on girlhood, young love and heartbreak, among other familiar themes to anyone who’s been 16, hasn’t always been considered serious work worthy of recognition.
But Ava Jeffs has always taken Swift seriously. The Stanford sophomore views each of her albums as self-contained storybooks, with their own worlds, characters, motifs. She’s grown up with Swift, relating more to her music the older she gets. She even wrote her Stanford application essay on Swift’s song “Clean,” the final track on her renowned “1989,” which she rerecorded this year.
“(Swift) kind of, in a way, helped me get here,” Jeffs told CNN.
In the spring, she’ll teach a course about Swift’s narrative storytelling through song. She sees Swift as a lifelong English teacher, in a way, and her close reads of Swift’s songs have prepared her for her first time teaching, she said.
“They can get as much out of the work as I did, and as I do now,” Jeffs said. “They can use that in their own life to process things. That’s what people get from stories and songs — someone putting into words what you can’t sometimes. I think that’s what Taylor’s always done.”