Photo by Sofía García Vargas | The Crow’s Nest
By Riley Benson
“Taylor Swift Fever” has swept the world, whether it is through Swift’s yearly album releases, attendance at football games or announcements at award shows. Part of this craze has also been happening at college campuses across the country who are hosting college courses based around the artist, from her lyricism in music to impact on copyright law.
This upcoming semester, the University of South Florida is participating in the trend and taking it a step further.
Professors at USF have come together to offer Taylor Swift Eras (LIT 3301: Cultural Studies & Pop Arts) and students at the St. Petersburg campus have established the Taylor Swift Society, a club that all USF students can join.
“Calling all mad women, heartbreak princes, and tortured poets! In this course, we’ll do a close and critical study of the current cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift,” writes the description for the Taylor Swift Eras course. “Together, we’ll explore the cultural history behind Swift’s career, and we’ll interpret her lyrics as poetry, using a range of approaches. We’ll also consider Swift as a performer and self-marketer: how does she fashion herself as a writer, musician, and cultural icon through both art and public life?”
There are three sections of the course available, although it will be merged into one joint class taught by Emily Jones, Jessica Cook and Michelle Taylor. This course will be offered at the Tampa campus in the fall 2024 semester, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 to 10:45 a.m.
“[Cook, Taylor and I] were having lunch together and we got into an interpretive conversation about the song ‘Begin Again’ from Swift’s album ‘Red,’” said Jones, who varies from teaching courses on Shakespeare and British literature.
The three of them began debating about the storyline behind the song, and found themselves using textual evidence to make each of their arguements. Only to come to the realiszation that students could do the same analysis of Swift’s song that they were.
“‘Our students could do this,’ someone said, and then, ‘We could teach a class. We should teach a class!’ Long story short, here we are,” Jones said.
Jones, Cook and Taylor are all professors of the English department at USF, and have a passion for teaching literature.
Through this course, they hope that incorporating a famous figure, like Taylor Swift, will have students thinking about literature outside of the classroom. Using the necessary skills that are part of studying English, like close reading, and analyzing an argument, can introduce students into how to apply their academic perspective on literature to their daily lives.
“Too often the idea gets propagated that art can’t be studied until it has withstood a certain test of time or been deemed ‘high culture’ by the right people –– whoever they are. In reality, though, much of what we read in literature courses was popular in its own time, like Swift’s music is today. That in and of itself makes it worth studying—including as it’s happening,” says Taylor, who has been teaching at USF for eight years and coordinates the general education literature program.
Similarly, other schools, like the University of Florida (UF), are also teaching Taylor Swift-inspired courses. Melina Jimenez teaches “Musical Storytelling With Taylor Swift and Other Iconic Female Artists,” which focuses on a different side of Swift’s writing than the class by Jones, Taylor and Cook.
“[The class] will be focused on the lyrics and storytelling aspects and looking at themes such as growing up, revenge, fate, among others. The students will listen to an assigned playlist each week and annotate the lyrics. In class, we’ll discuss their annotations to draw parallels among the songs and artists,” Jeminez explained.
Jeminez was inspired to teach the course after taking a Taylor Swift writing workshop last summer.
“The discussions we had were so interesting that I thought it would be fun to create a space for students to have similar discussions, having seen previous students’ interest in Taylor Swift and the discussions we had in other [UF] Honors courses,” she said.
Courses based on Swift’s lyricism and storytelling aren’t the only way professor’s are incorporating Swift into their class. While Jones, Taylor, Cook and Jeminez focus on the writing within her music, Vivek Jayaram teaches the legal and ethical side of Swift’s career.
Jayaram is a professor of law who teaches “Blank Space: IP Law Through the Lens of Taylor Swift’s Career” at the University of Miami . He became interested in Swift’s legal ongoings after learning about a trademark dispute with Evermore Theme Park in Utah (Swift has an album of the same name) and the reasons behind the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings.
“I was out to dinner with a friend when I joked, ‘I bet Swifties know more about IP law than most lawyers!’ And that sort of got me thinking about whether it would be an interesting course,” Jayaram said. “Teaching complex or technical material through relevant and contemporary pop culture keeps students engaged and allows them to understand the material better.”
While, the concept of courses based on Taylor Swift and other celebrities has garnered mixed reviews online,people in online forums like Reddit say, “Now people know what university to avoid” and “As long as there’s been pop culture, teachers have been using it as a Trojan horse for lessons plans.”
Yet, in reply to the latter comment, a user said, “People are going to be drawn into what classes interest them, which is better than classes they are not interested in or forced to take. As long as the class meets the educational curriculum and covers what [the state requires] to certify credit, then it is fine.”
Although, Cook and Jeminez noticed that they’ve only received positive reactions to offering the class.
“When we first proposed the Taylor Swift course, our department chair Dr. Lauren Arrington was immediately enthusiastic and supportive,” Cook said. “Student feedback has been very positive, both from students who identify as hard-core Swifties and as more casual fans. I think there’s a lot of excitement not just about applying our skills of critical analysis to Swift’s lyrics, but also about studying our own culture in live time as it’s happening.”
Similarly, Jeminez said she had been positive reaction amongst the students she knows, her colleges and the Taylor Swift Society they have on the UF campus. The Taylor Swift Society is a collection of Taylor Swift fan clubs at universities worldwide, and the Taylor Swift Society at UF isn’t the only chapter of the society that has reacted positively to the creation of the Swift themed courses.
“You can focus the classes on song lyrics, the economic impact of tours, the relationships between fans and artists, there’s a lot of things that might be of interest to a lot of people that they would be more engaged to learn about if their favorite artist were the main topic of the discussion,” Isabella Perez said, a Freshmen, Digital Communications and Multimedia major.
Photo courtesy of Isabella Perez
Perez is the vice president of The Swift Society Chapter at USF St. Petersburg.
“[Taylor’s] very lyrical, and so that’s very easy to turn into a English or writing course,” she said. “I think it’s cool, because it makes people more engaged. Like, sometimes in your major you have to take one or two classes that you hate and they’re not interesting to you, but you still have to do. I think adding classes like this make it kinda ‘worth it.’”
This past fall, USF St. Petersburg opened its own chapter of the Taylor Swift Society. They’ve been hosting events throughout the semester to celebrate all things Swift, such as a party celebrating the release of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version).’
While starting a club based around a celebrity sounds unconventional, Perez explains otherwise.
“We’ve made so many friends from people that have started going to the clubs, and we wouldn’t even talk about Taylor either. It was just a good way for us to have Taylor be a starting point of conversation and then turn that into a friendship.”
The concept for the club came to fruition by Ashlyn Averbeck, a sophomore, English major and the president of the club. Ironically, Perez didn’t know Averbeck all too well before she was asked to be the vice president. A mutual friend introduced them to each other, and their shared loved Swift made them become friends.
Perez mentioned, that the club has had major positive feedback from the students, and they’ve event had people drive over from the Tampa campus to attend events.
The club’s next event is “The Tortured Students Department,” in collaboration with USF St. Petersburg’s chapter of Her Campus, a club and digital magazine for students.
The event will be a finals week study session and listening party for Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” The event is on Apr. 19 (the same day the album is releasing) at 5 p.m. in the USC Reef.
Taylor Swift mania is hitting USF, and for the time being–– it’s here to stay.
Whether it be through the courses next fall, the Taylor Swift Society, or The Era’s Tour concert that took three stops in Tampa last April, you can be sure to run into a Swiftie or two, amongst all the USF Bulls.
The USF St. Petersburg Regional Chancellor, Christian Hardigree, even joked about the popularity of Taylor Swift-courses in a post on her LinkedIn.
“Universities like Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Florida, and more are offering classes – I could totally see “The Psychology of Fandom” or the “Economic Impact of Swifties” or something like that on the horizon,” she writes in the post, explaining that she’d been asked by students on campus about the idea of introducing a course to the St. Petersburg Campus.
With the introduction of the Taylor Swift class at USF Tampa, St. Petersburg students should stay on the look out for a class at the campus in the future, as even the chancellor is on board with shaking off traditional course offerings.
