How Taylor Swift is inspiring students at the University of Texas with her songwriting

Taylor Swift continues to inspire University students across the United States. This time the University of Texas at Austin will be adding an exciting English course to their curriculum, titled ‘The Taylor Swift Songbook.’

Just in time for Fall 2022 semester, students will enjoy Taylor’s work, while they learn about famous poets, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson and Plath.

Professor Elizabeth Scala will be using the singer-songwriter’s songbook and the cultural context, to start class participation and debates.

“This course uses the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods — basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines,” Scala explained.

The course focuses “on Swift’s music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated.” The students will consider “frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization” as they practice “close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments.”

Professor Scala also shared her thoughts about the importance and innovation that this course brings for students. “I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary.”

She continued explaining that she wants to “show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words.”