Great news for Swifties: Harvard will soon be offering a course on Taylor Swift.

Next semester, the university’s English department will be offering a course titled ‘Taylor Swift and Her World’, taught by Professor Stephanie Burt. In the class, students will examine Swift’s lyrics, music, and cultural influence.

“She’s one of the great songwriters of our time, she’s figured out how to write songs with broad appeal which not all great songwriters do, and she’s learned to use those extraordinary gifts alongside other gifts and privileges of image management and fan interaction, from her early and skilful use of MySpace to her current megatour,” Burt explains, speaking to Dazed.

“Her work also provides a way to read and think about other topics in literature and culture: teenage identities, whiteness, fame and the wish for fame, self-doubt, adulthood (whatever that means), compulsory heterosexuality and heteropessimism.”

Love her or loathe her, Taylor Swift is unquestionably one of the biggest artists of our time. At present, she is the most listened-to artist on the planet: at one point in October, she occupied all ten spots on the Billboard Hot 100. Following the release of her latest album, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), she became the first artist in history to secure six number one albums that have sold over one million copies in their first week. She’s broken box office records, with her concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, raking in $250 million to become the highest-grossing concert film of all time. She has a hefty legion of devoted fans – Swifties – who regularly go to extremes for the singer, such as camping outside venues for months just to get the best view.

Anyone who thinks Swift is too trivial to be worthy of study is “wrong”, Burt says. “She’s a great songwriter, and songwriting is its own art form (she’s not a great poet, or a great novelist, or a great playwright, but she is a great songwriter),” she continues. “The course also includes – that is, students will have to read and discuss, and to write about! – Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson, and William Wordsworth. If you think they’re not worth taking seriously, I don’t know what else to say.”

In any case, this isn’t the only university course on Taylor Swift. The University of Florida (UF) will also be offering a course on the pop star next semester, named ‘Musical storytelling with Taylor Swift and other iconic female artists’ and taught by senior lecturer Melina Jimenez. The UF course will also dive deep into Swift’s discography, as well as the works of other female artists including Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, and Dolly Parton.

Many other universities also offer classes on Swift, including Ghent University in Belgium, the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University, Berklee College of Music, the University of California at Berkeley, Arizona State, New York University, and Stanford.

In addition, a number of courses on other pop culture figures have been introduced at other institutions in recent years, including a class on Harry Styles at Texas State University, a class on Nicki Minaj at Berkeley, and a class on Bad Bunny at San Diego State.

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