Taylor Swift fans are already clamouring for the chance to study their idol at the University of Guelph in a new course centred on the megastar and her outsized impact on popular culture.
Icons of Popular Music, an online-only, distance education course open to everyone — including those outside the student body — will launch for the first time in the winter semester of 2025.
The 12-week class will delve not just into Swift as a figure, but use her work as a lens to “interrogate questions of social significance surrounding gender politics, religion, branding, fan culture and more,” Alyssa Woods, an associate professor of popular music at Guelph who co-created the course, told the Star.
The demand has been overwhelming. Within days of listing the course on the university’s OpenEd platform, without any advertisement or even noting Swift’s name in the title, nearly 500 students had signed up. It reached its 600-student limit five minutes after Guelph issued its first press release promoting the course on Thursday, Woods said.
“I’m really happy to see such a large number of students who’ll be engaging with this content,” she continued. “We’ve encountered friends or other parents who said that they’d love to take it. So I do think that this type of content has a reach beyond the core university population.”
While the course is centred on Swift at the moment, given her current dominance of the zeitgeist — and as the pop star plays the second half of her six-concert stop in Toronto this weekend — Woods hopes to eventually tackle other popular musicians in the future. “I don’t anticipate this phenomenon, especially with the Eras Tour, really fizzling out all that quickly.”
In addition to being entirely online, the four-credit course is also asynchronous, meaning there are no scheduled class times and students can approach the class at their own pace. There is an optional, weekly live discussion period with the instructor for those interested.
The university is also mulling a summer option for the course, depending on demand and how well the course performs, Woods added.
Yet Swift’s enormous impact is not only on popular culture, said Robert Edwards, the course’s other co-creator and a scholar of religion and popular culture, but also touches on politics, economics and the world at large.
“These figures have a very direct impact on how people who consume their music engage with and view the world around them,” he said. “When one of these stars say ‘I am endorsing this candidate for political office’,” it has a direct, tangible, measurable impact.
“When someone like Taylor Swift says ‘I believe this,’ well, they have the biggest soapbox in the world to stand on,” he continued. And when she shares her world view, it causes noticeable ripples in the wider culture.
Guelph isn’t the first school to dip its toes into the topic. In Canada, Queen’s University recently launched Taylor Swift’s Literary Legacy, a cultural studies course focused on analyzing Swift’s songs as literature. Similar Swift-centered classes have appeared at the University of Texas, New York University and even Harvard.
What sets her class apart, Woods said, is its focus on using Swift as a case study to analyze wider societal issues.
“It’s not just a survey of Swift’s music or biography,” she continued. “This is really a critical exploration of how we approach studying (the impact of Swift) and other similar figures.”
