Taylor Swift Is the Topic of College Course on Social Psychology – Billboard

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 study from her profession.

The course, known as Psychology of Taylor Swift — Superior Subjects of Social Psychology, is being supplied this fall and can be taught by PhD pupil Alexandra Wormley. “The course is mainly utilizing Taylor Swift as a semester-long instance of various phenomena — gossip, relationships, revenge,” she informed ASU’s information website, emphasizing that “the category just 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 can be connecting themes from Swift’s varied albums to psychology, giving 2017’s Status for instance. “Taylor’s sixth album, Status, is her comeback after disappearing from the highlight as a result 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 examine 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 just lately, Stanford introduced a winter quarter course, “All Too Nicely (10 Week Model),” which guarantees an “in depth evaluation” of the No. 1 hit’s emotive lyrics taught by alum Nona Hungate.