There’s no denying Taylor Swift’s popularity in the world of pop culture. The singer has more No. 1 albums than any other woman in history and made over $1 billion in revenue just from ticket sales for the “Eras” tour. Swift has taken over the world with her music — and has now made her way into the academic scene in many universities.
This year, NC State joined a handful of schools, including Stanford, Harvard and Berklee College of Music, in offering a Taylor Swift class when it debuted “Taylor Swift: Through the Eras.”
An application-based honors course, the class is taught by Anne Auten, assistant director of the University Honors Program, who was introduced to the singer’s music by her students during a study abroad trip.
Auten, who described herself as a “freshly-minted Swiftie,” said until she discussed the singer last summer with her students, Auten didn’t think Swift’s music was for her.
“I didn’t grow up with her music; I don’t have the nostalgia component,” Auten said. “But over the past, actually decade, I’ve heard from so many students, ‘You should listen to Taylor Swift.’… And I was like, ‘You know what? I need to give her a chance. I really need to listen to her.’”
Auten said “folklore,” Swift’s eighth studio album, was her gateway to Swiftiedom. From there, her interest in Swift’s music and cultural presence grew, leading her students John Craven and Gabby Chiarenza to propose the idea of a Taylor Swift class.
“I don’t have a history of listening to her or being a fan of her,” Auten said. “But I’ve kind of listened and researched everything obsessively kind of in the past year, and then these two really said, ‘Hey, what if you did a course about Taylor Swift?’”
Auten said Swift’s global relevance made “Through the Eras” a perfect fit for an honors seminar and allowed her to obtain departmental approval to implement and teach this class.
“Our honor seminars in general … shouldn’t be about lecturing to students,” Auten said. “They’re about seminar discussions, learning how to problem solve and learning how to think critically and creatively. And I mean, she’s a massive global phenomenon, like, how could we not talk about that?”
Craven, a fourth-year studying business administration, said the existence of Taylor Swift and other pop-star-centered courses at other universities paved the way for one at NC State, but he believes a course centered on Swift was inevitable with her rise in not just popularity, but cultural prevalence.
“I remember seeing, like, at the same time that some Taylor courses were first coming out, I saw a few Beyonce ones, and I was just really interested,” Craven said. “These two huge pop figures are getting more respect in academia, and what have they done not only for pop culture but for like, representation, lyricism and artwork in general. So I think it was just naturally going to happen.”
Auten acknowledged that other pop stars in society have larger followings and more money than Swift and said when planning the course, she, Craven and Chiarenza considered focusing the course on multiple female pop stars.
“One thing that I think the three of us considered together — because you’ve got some massive Beyonce fans here, Lady Gaga, I could go on — we talked about ‘Well, should we make it about some of these really prolific female pop stars?’”
The group decided that Swift’s career and place in our culture, and specifically the “Eras” tour, made her a good fit for an academically focused course.
“The Eras tour — when Forbes is writing an article about the revenue that it’s generating, when she is helping to support our economy and the economy of these places where she goes and does these shows — you can talk about it from a financial aspect; you can talk about it from a pop cultural aspect,” Auten said. “We’re also going to get into the political sort of ramifications of her being vocal or not about certain things. I mean, my 6-year-old knows all about Taylor Swift. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that every single person is aware of her on some level.”
Chiarenza, now an NC State alum, said the tangible cultural shift of embracing femininity last summer influenced the decision to not just have a class on women in music, but a class on Taylor Swift in particular.
“I feel like it was important to focus on Taylor Swift at this particular point in time,” Chiarenza said. “We saw that this was really like, ‘The summer of the girl,’ with people going to the theaters to go see Barbie and the Eras tour. And it was just a really big moment where femininity was getting a lot of attention.”
There are currently two one-credit honors sections of “Through the Eras,” each with 13 students. Auten said she would love for the course to be offered to all NC State students, but that the course’s limited capacity and her position in the honors program limit it to honors students only for the time being.
“As my position is assistant director of the honors program, I don’t have affiliation with another department on campus,” Auten said. “But if I was to expand this to a three-credit hour course, I would hope to bring in other professors from different disciplines.”
