Texas university offers new course on the songwriting of Taylor Swift

The songwriting of Taylor Swift will be the subject of a new literature course at a Texas university this autumn.

The pop megastar’s songs will be “read” alongside other UK and US literary giants such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats and Plath.

Titled The Taylor Swift Songbook, the course will be on offer at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) later this year.

Preliminary texts for students include the pop megastar’s albums Red (Taylor’s Version), Lover, Folklore and Evermore.

UTA follows in the footsteps of New York University (NYU), which has previously offered a course on Swift as a music entrepreneur,  and the various pop and country songwriters that helped shape her music and more.

The singer received an honorary doctor of fine arts from NYU at a student commencement ceremony earlier this year.

According to its description on the UTA website, the new course “uses the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods—basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines.

“Focusing on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we’ll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments,” the description continued.

It comes after a separate university in Texas announced it will be offering a course based on the work of Harry Styles from 2023.

The course, titled Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture will be on offer at Texas State University Honours College from next spring.

It will focus on the pop megastar’s work, both in music and film, in order to “understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity”.