Yale University is getting in formation with a new course dedicated to studying Beyoncé.
Starting this upcoming spring semester, Yale will offer a class titled “Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music.” The aim, according to its course description, is to use her work as a lens through which to examine Black intellectual thought and activism.
It’s the latest college course to take on pop culture-inspired themes by focusing on a global music superstar, as universities around the world have embraced classes on the cultural impact of celebrities including Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
Following Beyoncé’s innovations and influence from her self-titled 2013 album to her latest, “Cowboy Carter,” students will analyze her albums, performance politics and concert films.
By looking at her midcareer repertoire, Yale’s new course will explore scholarly works and cultural texts across Black feminist theory, philosophy and anthropology, as well as art history, performance studies and musicology, the course description states.
The new class will be taught by writer and Black studies scholar Daphne Brooks, who co-founded Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, a community of faculty and students working to “explore the untapped variety of black sound archives.”
Brooks told the Yale Daily News that the music icon is “just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time.”
“The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetic, and her utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics,” she said, “there’s just no one like her.”
The course adds Yale to a string of universities that have created courses inspired by Beyoncé over the past decade or so.
Courses on the star’s political and cultural influence have popped up since the early 2010s, with Rutgers University’s “Politicizing Beyoncé” class and a “Beyonce: Critical Feminist Perspectives and U.S. Black Womanhood” course at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Cornell University has also offered versions of its “Beyoncé Nation” course, which studies her career trajectory as well as her impact on political activism and feminism. Other universities that have offered similar Beyoncé-themed courses include the University of Texas at San Antonio, California Polytechnic State University and Arizona State University.
And in the wake of Taylor Swift’s album rerecordings and “Eras Tour,” which shot her to even wider fame in recent years, multiple colleges — including Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the University of Florida — also began introducing courses tailored to the study of her lyricism and pop superstardom.
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