You Can Now Study Taylor Swift at Harvard, But There’s a Catch You Can Now Study Taylor Swift at Harvard, But There’s a Catch

Study Taylor Swift. At a university.

This is what students at America’s elite Harvard University can do this semester. Stephanie Burt, professor of English literature, offers a course called “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have registered, writes the New York Times.

But not only at Harvard, but also at New York University, Arizona State University, Stanford and the University of Texas in Austin, the pop culture object Taylor Swift or her lyrics are studied.

And next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer a course titled “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version.”

Swift’s work as “the spine”

But back to Harvard: The New York Times wanted to know from Burt why she learned Taylor Swift’s lyrics. She reveals to the US newspaper that years ago she noticed a song that was “lyrically more compelling than all the other songs” – it was Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me”.

In the course she is offering this year at Harvard, novels by contemporary authors or writers from the 18th and 19th centuries are read weekly. The content of these lyrics is then compared with songs by Talyor Swift. Swift’s work forms the ‘backbone’ of the course, but the literature to be read in the course is part of the corpus that is standard in English-language seminars.

As proof of achievement, several theses must be submitted in which one cannot simply write about Taylor Swift, but must deal with the subject of the course in a scientific manner. The English professor responds to critics of her course by saying that one should always remember that “anything that now takes up a lot of time in a modern English seminar was once a popular art form with little prestige” – such as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Ascension of the novel.

At the end of the interview, the ‘New York Times’ mainly wonders whether Taylor Swift will stay the course. Burt just says she asked Swift through X, but the pop star is very busy right now. (yam)