What do students learn about at venerable Ivy League institutions like Harvard? Taylor Swift, apparently. Such is a class that began in February of 2024, taught by a transgender Harvard professor named Stephanie Burt. Burt, an English professor, is a self-described “diehard Swiftie” and spoke about it to Harvard Magazine in a recent interview.
News of the class comes amidst allegations that schools like Harvard have lost some, if not much, of their academic rigor, particularly in the “soft” subjects like English and History (as opposed to the “hard” sciences like Chemistry) by focusing more on the current pieties of the left and subject of popular interest than groundbreaking research or rigorous analysis. “Taylor Swift and Her World” would be such a course about which detractors of the university’s lurch away from its traditionally rigorous coursework would complain.
In any case, Burt spoke about the reason for the class to Harvard Magazine, saying that the world is now Swift’s and she makes it “better and more interesting” with her art and performances. “It is [Swift’s] world and we live in it, and I think her art makes the world that we live in better and more interesting,” Burt said in the interview.
Continuing, Burt explained how the course is justified as an English class, saying, “This is an English course, which means that we focus on the arts that use words.” Burt continued, “It is a course focused on a songwriter, which means that we look at how the words that she uses interact with the music that goes with them, and the way that she sings and performs them, and how they go out into the world and get heard.”
Then the issue of whether the class is one that fits with Harvard’s reputation as a serious place of learning. Particularly, Burt addressed “the controversy that people have surrounding the idea of teaching Taylor Swift academically” at Harvard, saying, “Some of the controversy is based on a misunderstanding of what the course is.”
Burt added that some of the issue boils down to people not understanding that it is just a one-semester class rather than a full major, saying, “And this misunderstanding, I think a little bit of it comes from people who think that it’s now possible to major in Taylor Swift at Harvard. Because the word course in Britain and in some other parts of the anglophone world means what we would call a major or a concentration.”
Watch Burt here:
The class’s course description notes, “The first song on Taylor Swift’s first record, released when she was 16, paid homage (by name) to a more established country artist. Today she’s the most recognizable country– or formerly country? or pop?– artist in North America, if not the world: her songwriting takes in half a dozen genres, and her economic impact changes cities. We will move through Swift’s own catalogue, including hits, deep cuts, outtakes, re-recordings, considering songwriting as its own art, distinct from poems recited or silently read. We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts. We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure. We will look at her precursors, from Dolly Parton to the Border Ballads, and at work about her (such as the documentary “Miss Americana”). And we will read literary works important to her and works about song and performance, with novels, memoirs and poems by (among others) Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson, Tracey Thorn, and William Wordsworth.“
