A transgender Harvard professor is boasting about a new course, titled, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” which began in February at the Ivy League university.
“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,” Harvard English professor and “diehard Swiftie” Stephanie Burt, who teaches the new course, told Harvard Magazine.
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“This is an English course, which means that we focus on the arts that use words,” the professor 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,” Burt explained.
After being asked to respond to “the controversy that people have surrounding the idea of teaching Taylor Swift academically” at Harvard, the professor said, “Some of the controversy is based on a misunderstanding of what the course is.”
“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,” Burt added. “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.”
Burt’s class on Taylor Swift also covers “queer subtext” in the pop star’s songs, according to the course description.
Taylor Swift performs at Accor Stadium on February 23, 2024 in Sydney, Australia. (Don Arnold/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
“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,” the description reads.
“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,” the course description adds.
As Breitbart News reported, Harvard is not the only university teaching a course on the jet-setting climate change activist who backs Democrats. Swift courses are also being taught at UC Berkeley and University of Florida.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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