The University of Arizona wants to study Taylor Swift’s career. The singer has become one of the world’s most famous superstars, and a new course at Arizona State University is exploring what psychologists can learn from her story.
The course is called The Psychology of Taylor Swift – Advanced Topics of Social Psychology, will be offered this fall and will be taught by graduate student Alexandra Wormley. “The course uses Taylor Swift as a semester-long example of various phenomena — gossip, relationships, revenge,” she told the ASU news site. The researcher emphasized that “the class is not a seminar about how much we like or dislike it – we want to learn about psychology.”
Arizona State University Course
Alexandra Wormley added that at the University of Arizona, she will connect the various topics Taylor Swift touched on with psychology, citing the album as an example. Reputation 2017 “Taylor’s sixth album, Reputation, is her return after disappearing due to conflicts with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. The disk is the star’s revenge on them – and all the media. In fact, the album is an incredible success and is accompanied by a stadium tour.” The researcher explained that “students already know this, but do they also know why we like to take revenge? Do they know how we carry out revenge? Social psychology can help us understand this.”
Taylor Swift and university research: this is not an isolated case
More and more universities in the US are dedicating themselves to Taylor Swift. In February 2022, Rolling Stone writer Brittany Spanos hosted her first superstar class at New York University. Last August, the University of Texas at Austin introduced a new liberal arts course called Literary Competitions and Contexts – Taylor Swift Songbook. The lessons analyzed the lyrics of the songwriters, comparing them with the lyrics of other authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson and Plath.
Most recently, Stanford announced the winter semester. Everything is too good (10 week version) which promises an “in-depth” analysis of the emotional lyrics of the number one hit taught by alumnus Nona Hungate.