Yale to offer ‘Beyonce Makes History’ course to study pop singer’s ‘artistic genius’

Yale University is offering a course on the works of the pop music singer Beyonce. 

The course is titled “Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music” and will be offered in the spring semester of 2025. 

“This class centers the 2010s and 2020s’ sonic and visual repertoire of Beyonce Knowles-Carter (from 2013’s self-titled album through 2024’s Cowboy Carter) as the portal through which to rigorously examine key interdisciplinary works of Black intellectual thought and grassroots activist practices across the centuries,” the course description reads. 

Students will “explore and analyze the dense, robust and virtuosic aesthetics, socio-historical and political dimensions of Beyonce’s pathbreaking, mid-career body of work and to, likewise, use her aesthetics” in order to study “Black Studies scholarship and Black freedom struggle scholarly and cultural texts.”

[RELATED: Beyonce to remove this ‘ableist’ word found in university language guides from ‘Heated’]

“In short, this is a class that traces the relationship between Beyonce’s artistic genius and Black intellectual practice,” the description concludes. 

The class will be taught by Professor Daphne A. Brooks, who teaches “African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music” at Yale. 

Brooks’s previous work has focused on race and gender and their relationship to music. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

“I’m looking forward to exploring her body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, Black feminist politics, Black liberation politics and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire,” Brooks said about the class. 

While speaking about her new course, Brooks also alleged that black female artists “are sometimes completely marginalized from some of the highest accolades and are so rarely taken seriously as musicians who are capable of and worthy of recognition for serious monumental work.” She also praised Beyonce for being more political than other singers, saying that “[o]ther artists have not [embraced] intersectional political and historical work like Beyoncé has.”

Brooks told Campus Reform: “This course invites its students to think critically about the culture that they consume and to place canonical works of literature, history, and philosophy in conversation with modern culture.”

Yale is not the only university to showcase the pop singer’s work: An “anti-racist reading group” met at George Mason University this summer to talk about, among other things, Beyonce’s country music album “Cowboy Carter.” The articles provided to attendees ahead of the discussion alleged that country music has become a “staging ground for a certain type of white grievance” and that Beyonce’s country music was allegedly rejected by supposedly racist white country music fans.

[RELATED: UT expels student over Cardi B, Beyonce tweets, backtracks after free speech org challenges decision]

Colleges and universities have also been offering a plethora of courses related to another popular pop singer: Taylor Swift.

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville is offering a course focused on Taylor Swift that looks at how her work relates to “race, sexuality, and feminism.”

The University of South Florida also started a fall English course discussing Swift’s work and “race, ethnicity and gender.”

Tying Swift’s work to intersectional themes appears to common in certain circles of higher education, as another school, New York University, also offered a course on Swift in 2022 and how “whiteness and power . . . [relate] to her image.” 

Campus Reform has reached out to Yale University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.