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Taylor on Campus
Illustration by David Brinley; Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images (Taylor Swift); Shutterstock.com (All Other Images)
Taylor Swift has already taken over streaming platforms, stadiums, and movie theaters—and now she’s set to conquer higher education. Colleges around the nation have recently begun offering courses related to the pop star. The topics vary: Arizona State University, for example, has offered a psychology class on Swift’s work, while the University of California, Berkeley is planning one on Swift’s entrepreneurship. Many classes, however, are using Swift’s lyrics to study storytelling, often pairing her work with classic literature that touches on similar themes. It’s an ideal way to get students interested, says Stephanie Burt, an English professor teaching Harvard University’s Swift course. “If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar,” she says, “your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like.”