When Taylor Swift sings about “tortured poets,” she probably never imagined her own songwriting would become the subject of rigorous academic study at some of America’s most prestigious universities. Yet here we are, in an era where Ivy League institutions are embracing the pop superstar as a legitimate subject of scholarly inquiry.
At Harvard University, Professor Stephanie Burt has created something truly unprecedented with her course “Taylor Swift and Her World.” The self-proclaimed head of Harvard’s “Tortured Poets Department” has drawn massive interest from students, with over 200 eager participants filling Lowell Lecture Hall twice a week for 75-minute sessions that feel more like cultural celebrations than traditional lectures.
“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 syllabus explains, playfully weaving Swift’s lyrical references throughout academic language. “We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure.”
The course goes far beyond surface-level pop culture analysis. Students examine Swift’s catalog alongside literary giants like Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson, and William Wordsworth, exploring how the singer-songwriter functions as what poet Allen Grossman would call “a hermeneutic friend” – someone who establishes herself as the listener’s guide through life’s complexities.
Teaching assistant Matthew Jordan demonstrates this connection by analyzing Swift’s strategic use of the word “you” across her “Fearless” album, showing how she engages listeners by making them feel directly addressed. In songs like “Fifteen,” “Breathe,” and “You Belong With Me,” this simple pronoun appears within the first few words, immediately drawing audiences into Swift’s narrative world.
The enthusiasm extends beyond Harvard’s gates. At Northeastern University, Catherine Fairfield led a two-day Zoom course that attracted over 500 students. The curriculum examined themes of womanhood, societal expectations of female success, and the cultural dynamics reflected in contemporary pop music.
According to sources, UC Berkeley launched “The Music and Impact of Taylor Swift” to trace her artistic evolution from country roots to global pop phenomenon. Meanwhile, Austin Peay State University offered “The Invisible String of Romanticism,” comparing Swift’s songwriting techniques to those of William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets through detailed lyrical analysis.
Stanford University previously featured a student-led course called “Storytelling with Taylor Swift Through the Eras,” pairing each album with distinct interpretive frameworks to develop textual analysis skills. New York University made headlines in 2022 with a course taught by Rolling Stone journalist Brittany Spanos, examining Swift’s role as a music entrepreneur and the broader politics of contemporary popular music.
Professor Burt explains the academic value: “It is to connect these things to other artists who are currently more popular and to say, ‘If you like this, try that, if you enjoy studying this, try that.’ And that is how works of art survive.”
The Harvard course requires no traditional exams but challenges students with evidence-based academic essays comparing Swift’s work to other literary texts, along with creative assignments ranging from song composition to stage design. The demand proved so overwhelming that Burt recruited additional teaching assistants through social media, receiving hundreds of responses from enthusiastic Swifties with expertise spanning performance studies, copyright law, and American literature.
As one Harvard senior noted, even while working on her thesis until dawn, missing this particular class was simply “out of the question.”