KU to explore Taylor Swift’s influence on sports, music, pop culture and politics
Does it sometimes feel like it’s Taylor Swift’s world and we’re all just living in it? There are oh so many reasons for that.
Her monster Eras Tour has poured millions into local economies around the world. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and attendance at games has earned legions of new (largely female) fans for the NFL.
Last week after she endorsed Kamala Harris for president and encouraged people to register to vote, more than 400,000 people in just 24 hours followed her advice to visit vote.gov, a federal voting information site.
So what’s the Swift secret sauce?
Beginning Wednesday, the University of Kansas will dive into that in a six-lecture series exploring Swift’s influence on everything from sports and music to pop culture and politics.
The lectures are open to KU students and the general public, in person and via Zoom.
“Taylor Swift offers an opportunity to engage students in intellectual content across disciplines that will hopefully inspire them to explore fields they otherwise would not have considered,” Misty Heggeness, associate professor of economics and public affairs and one of the faculty members organizing the series, said in a statement.
One of the speakers, Stephanie Burt, a poet, essayist, literary critic and English professor at Harvard University, will explain the value of studying a pop star.
Burt created the “Taylor Swift and Her World” class at Harvard last year through which she and her students learned that “Swift attracts attention,” Burt wrote in June in Vanity Fair.
“That attention amplifies things about her, even without her. Teaching the class sometimes felt like one more of Swift’s vaunted collaborations, another multimedia performance involving reporters, and students, and her.
“Journalists asked if Swift would visit. (She’d be welcome, but she’s got a lot going on.) They asked what I wanted students to learn. (How to think about works of art.) And they asked if Harvard resisted a course on a celebrity. (We read dead people too, like Pope and James Weldon Johnson and Willa Cather. Who were, in their own time, celebrities.)“
KU sociology professor Brian Donovan, who last year launched a course on the Lawrence campus called “The Sociology of Taylor Swift,” will also lead a discussion. He has interviewed Swifties like himself across the country for a book about Swift’s fandom.
“I think her star power is greater than it has ever been in the entirety of her career,” Donovan told the Star last year. “I think she’s the closest to what we think of as American royalty.
“You have large swaths of the population cheering for (Swift and Kelce) who might not even care for her music, but they like her persona and they regard her as deep down a good person.”
Here’s the lineup for the lecture series:
- “Watching from the Stands: Addressing Media Stereotypes Within the Taylor Swift-Sports Ecosystem.” 4:30-5:30 p.m. Sept. 18, 100 Stauffer-Flint Hall. Speaker: Steve Bien-Aimé, assistant professor, William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
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- “Hits Different: Why Taylor Swift Writes Such Strong Songs.” 3:30-4:30 p.m. Sept. 30, Watson Library 3 West. Speaker: Burt.
- “Parasocial Affordances and the Taylor Swift Fandom.” 4:30-5:30 p.m. Oct. 17, 100 Stauffer-Flint. Speaker: Donovan.
- “SWIFTYNOMICS: Women in Today’s Economy.” 4:30-5:30 p.m. Oct. 30, 100 Stauffer-Flint. Speaker: Heggeness.
- “What Are You Hearing? Focused Music Analysis for Non-Musicians.” 4:30-5:30 p.m. Nov. 13, 100 Stauffer-Flint. Speaker: Kerry Marsh, director of Jazz Singers and Vocal Jazz Lab, School of Music.
- “Sexy Baby, Monster on a Hill, or Something Else? Using the Eras Tour to Understand the Effects of Culture on Public Opinion.” 4:30-5:30 p.m. Dec. 12, 100 Stauffer-Flint. Speaker: Clayton Webb, associate professor of political science.
You don’t have to register to attend in person, but do need to sign up if you’re going to watch on Zoom. Registration links are on the Taylor Swift at KU web page, which lists KU courses currently being taught about Swift.
The lecture series is sponsored by the Institute for Policy & Social Research, the Department of English, the Hall Center for the Humanities, the School of Public Affairs & Administration and the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.
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