What a Class on Taylor Swift Reveals About Us

It’s additionally what made her the topic of examine at UC San Diego. During the latest spring quarter, Nancy Guy, a professor within the Department of Music, taught a model new course entitled “Reading and Writing Taylor Swift.” The cultural research seminar, held in a small-group format, drew 16 college students from disciplines as diversified as math, engineering and psychology to review Swift’s artistry, fandom and affect. An ethnomusicologist whose work spans Western and Chinese opera, politics and the musics of Taiwan and China, Guy is the inaugural holder of the Chiu-Shan and Rufina Chen Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies. She plans to supply the course once more this coming spring.

The thrill of decoding — central to the Swiftie fandom — was on full show in the course of the lead-up to “The Life of a Showgirl.” Swift turned the discharge right into a puzzle: the orange door from the Eras Tour, lengthy a topic of fan theories; a countdown clock; and a glittering lock, earlier than lastly revealing the album cowl on her now-fiancé Travis Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast. Fans pored over each element — even speculating concerning the objects on the bookshelf behind her — whereas manufacturers from Sharpie to M&M’s and even the Empire State Building joined the orange-glittered frenzy throughout their social feeds. 

The spectacle revealed the extent of Swift’s cultural pull, the place even the smallest particulars grow to be speaking factors. It’s the identical dynamic that drove dialog in Guy’s classroom. As the album launch approached, we sat down together with her and two of her college students, Ethan Arnn, a third-year math main, and Angel Yan, a second-year chemical engineering main — each self-proclaimed Swifties — to mirror on the excitement across the new album and the way the course opened new methods of listening to and desirous about one of many world’s greatest stars:

How did you provide you with the thought for a course on Taylor Swift?

Nancy Guy: I’ve lengthy been all in favour of fandom — why we love the artists we do and the way these connections are fashioned. My 2015 book on American opera singer Beverly Sills checked out relatability and fan devotion, and whereas watching a documentary about Taylor on an extended flight from Taiwan, the parallels clicked for me. I wished college students to assume critically about her artistry and the methods she’s obtained within the media — particularly round politics.