Taylor Swift has grown into one of many greatest superstars on the planet — and a brand new Arizona State College course is digging in on what psychologists can be taught from her profession.
The course, referred to as Psychology of Taylor Swift — Superior Matters of Social Psychology, is being supplied this fall and will likely be taught by PhD scholar Alexandra Wormley. “The course is mainly utilizing Taylor Swift as a semester-long instance of various phenomena — gossip, relationships, revenge,” she advised ASU’s information website, emphasizing that “the category isn’t a seminar on how a lot we like or dislike her — we would like to have the ability to study psychology.”
She added that she will likely be connecting themes from Swift’s varied albums to psychology, giving 2017’s Fame for example. “Taylor’s sixth album, Fame, is her comeback after disappearing from the highlight because of conflicts with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. She enacts her revenge on them — and the broader media panorama — by dropping an extremely profitable album together with a stadium tour,” she defined. “The scholars know this — however do they know why we like revenge? Do they understand how we enact revenge? Social psychology can inform us.”
Swift has more and more been a subject of research at quite a few universities throughout the nation. In February 2022, NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music launched its first-ever class on the celebrity taught by Rolling Stone author Brittany Spanos. Final August, the College of Texas at Austin rolled out a brand new liberal arts course entitled Literary Contests and Contexts — The Taylor Swift Songbook, the place the singer-songwriter’s work was studied alongside the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson and Plath with “required texts” together with 4 of her most up-to-date albums.
Most lately, Stanford introduced a winter quarter course, “All Too Effectively (10 Week Model),” which guarantees an “in depth evaluation” of the No. 1 hit’s emotive lyrics taught by alum Nona Hungate.
