University of South Florida is the latest to offer a Taylor Swift course
The inspiration for the class came when the three course professors were discussing a Taylor Swift album.
Multiple other universities have offered or will be offering courses about Swift.
The University of South Florida will offer students the option to enroll in a course focused on Taylor Swift.
The class, LIT3301: Cultural Studies and the Popular Arts, is an English course that functions as a “study of American and international cultures as they are represented in the film, fiction, and other cultural artifacts of various ethnic groups and nationalities. Focuses on values/ethics, race, ethnicity and gender; thinking and writing skills.”
The course focuses on different pop culture topics, and will start centering on Taylor Swift in the upcoming fall semester.
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USF professors Jessica Cook, Emily Jones, and Michelle Taylor will teach the course, and Cook said that “[t]he idea came when I was having lunch with my colleagues [Jones and Taylor], and we were talking about the Taylor Swift album Red and the placement of a specific song on that album.”
“We both had different arguments for our ways of interpreting it, and we joked that our students could do this,” she continued.
Jones told Campus Reform that the three professors “have stopped responding to media requests for the time being; we found ourselves inundated with them last week and need to pause to focus on our students’ papers and exams during this final week of classes.”
USF is not the only Florida school to start a new Taylor Swift course.
In April, the University of Miami announced that it will offer a fall semester course titled “The Mastermind of the Taylor Swift Brand.”
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The University of Florida has already begun offering a “Musical Storytelling With Taylor Swift and Other Iconic Female Artists” course in the Spring 2024 semester.
In 2022, New York University also offered a course on Swift that discussed the pop singer in relation to “Whiteness” and “American nationalism.”
Campus Reform has reached out to the University of South Florida for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
