Belgian University offers Taylor Swift inspired literature course

Believed to be the first of its kind in Europe, a university in Belgium is offering a Taylor Swift inspired literature course. Elly McCausland, an assistant professor, pitched the idea of such a course to Ghent University after she found multiple parallels between the singer’s lyrics and the English literature that the academic had been studying for so long.

Much of the syllabus for Elly’s course at Ghent studies some of the greatest writes to exist such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Charlotte Bronte and William Shakespeare but it is the inclusion of the pop star Taylor Swift which has taken the world by frenzy.

“I’ve never had so many emails from excited students asking if they can take the course,” said McCausland. “And actually non-students as well, people who are not part of the university and who want to participate in some way,” she added.

McCausland said that in Swift’s’ The Great War’ she saw echoes of how Sylvia Plath jarringly spoke of war and battle to convey her pain in the poem Daddy, while Swift’s Mad Woman and the tale it tells of patriarchy and mental health harked back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

The course titled: Literature- Taylor’s Version which is due to start this autumn will capitalise on these links, using Taylor Swift’s songs and lyrics as a springboard to explore everything literature has to offer.  Elly McCausland said, “What I want to do is show students that although these texts might seem inaccessible, they can be accessible if we look at them from a slightly different angle”. “So, Shakespeare, in some way, is actually addressing a lot of the same questions as Taylor Swift is today, which seems crazy. But he is,” she added.

McCausland has said that she has come across people on the social media who are skeptical of her approach but according to her it is necessary to talk about this and start a discussion on what is literature, what is the canon and whether there can be text in literature. She also referred to the time Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 which got people talking.

However, she is not the first one to bring Taylor Swift in the academic discourse. In 2022, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute reportedly pioneered the pop queen’s path into academia, with a course examining the “appeal and aversions” of the musician. Since then, another half a dozen or so courses have sprung up across the US, investigating various aspects of the artist who recently became the first woman to have four albums in the Top 10 of the US album charts simultaneously.   

While McCausland was quick to acknowledge that similar courses could be fashioned from the work of other artists as well but as she was a self-proclaimed ‘Swiftie’ and had observed the singer for long and had found her songs to be threaded with literary references. She also said the ability of Taylor Swift to change her style of writing while penning deeply personal lines which could be related to by the masses made her the perfect choice.

Elly McCausland stressed that despite her passion for Swift’s work, the course would still be grounded in academics and designed to accommodate everyone from Swifties to those who disliked the artist. “There will be critics who think it’s sort of frivolous and silly,” she said. “The primary focus is literature, but also, I want us to think critically about Swift. I’m absolutely not gathering all of the Swifties and we’re going to spend three hours every Monday fangirling.”

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