harvard case study taylor swift

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University News | 2.8.2024

Inside Harvard’s Taylor Swift Class

An english course pairs the music with willa cather, william wordsworth, and dolly parton..

 “English 183TS: Taylor Swift and Her World” attracted a crowd of nearly 300 students this semester.  | MONTAGE illustration  BY NIKO YAITANES/ Harvard magazine;  bracelets courtesy of jennifer beaumont and kate wilfrid 

If Loker professor of English Stephanie Burt had her way, record stores would sell copies of Alexander Pope’s 1735 poem “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” with a snake—the symbol of Taylor Swift’s album Reputation— embossed on the cover.

Swift released Reputation in 2017, following a series of personal controversies that left her public image battered. “This is why we can’t have nice things,” she sings in a track of the same name, apparently referencing a falling-out with Kanye West, who falsely claimed she had given him permission to write a derogatory lyric about her. “Because you break them, I had to take them away,” the song continues.

Whether she knew it or not, argues Burt—who’s teaching this semester’s “English 183TS: Taylor Swift and Her World”—Swift was drawing upon a long tradition of literature about deceitful adversaries. In his 1735 verse-letter to his friend John Arbuthnot, Pope also reacts to public disapproval and judgment. He criticizes one rival’s jealousy of other talented artists:

Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires

True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,

Blest with each talent and each art to please,

And born to write, converse, and live with ease:

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,

Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,

View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,

And hate for arts that caus'd himself to rise?

“In my ideal world, when Reputation (Taylor’s Version) comes out,” says Burt, referring to a rerecording of the album likely to be released later this year, “five percent of the people who are talking about [it] will also become Alexander Pope fans. So that’s the not-so-secret goal of this class.” Burt pauses, sitting outside the Barker Center with a Taylor Swift tote bag and donning a newsboy cap—the same style of hat worn by Swift on the album cover of Red (Taylor’s Version). “But I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t love the music.”

Burt’s course has sparked a media frenzy and drawn a crowd of almost 300 students. (So many people signed up that Burt turned to X solicit applications for more teaching fellows. The final teaching staff includes graduate students from other universities, such as Northeastern and Brown, as well as a Harvard history of science Ph.D. candidate who runs a Taylor Swift TikTok account.) With the viral attention has come scrutiny. Critics on social media have raised concerns over a fan teaching about an artist she loves; others are skeptical that Swift’s work merits such deep attention and analysis.

Some of this criticism, Burt says, stems from a misunderstanding of what the course is. The semester is not solely devoted to analyzing Swift’s discography: “It’s ‘Taylor and ,’” she says, “rather than ‘Taylor instead of .’” The syllabus includes novels by Willa Cather and James Weldon Johnson, poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, songs by Prince and Dolly Parton, and music theory and criticism.

Pairing Swift’s music with these sources is about more than mixing candy with vitamins. Comparisons between different works with similar themes can help clarify the formal choices authors make to explore those themes, Burt argues. She returns to “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” to make her point, this time comparing it to “Nothing New,” another Swift song about facing public criticism. “Here are two ways,” Burt says, “to emotionally embody and share in words possible reactions to being unjustly accused.”

Pope’s sentiments find their form in eighteenth-century closed rhyming couplets, a structure that “lends itself to quotable maxims about how everyone should behave,” Burt says; Pope defends himself by “standing up for a generalized idea of goodness” that he wants others to repeat. “Nothing New,” on the other hand, uses a verse-chorus structure. The song “wants to be sung along, it wants you to feel for her,” Burt says. “It invites more sympathy and less direction.” Reading “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” on its own, one might struggle to discern the effect of the poem’s form. But pair it with another text that explores a similar theme, Burt says, and “seeing the overlap in sentiments can help you appreciate what Pope is doing.”

This isn’t the first time Burt has expanded the bounds of the English department. Since 2020, she has offered a course called “Superheroes and Power,” which examines Marvel and DC comics alongside texts by writers such as John Milton and Hannah Arendt. The syllabi of this and the Taylor Swift course are shaped not only by the possibilities that arise from comparison, but also by a belief that non-traditional literary forms can benefit from “close reading”—discerning how a text creates meaning through careful analysis of its details.

“If the only thing close reading is good for is Shakespeare, then that says pretty sad things about close reading,” says M.J. Cunniff, the head teaching fellow of the Taylor Swift course and a Ph.D. student at Brown studying poetics. Some observers have raised concerns about the seep of “cultural studies”—analysis of pop culture such as music and movies—into English departments. “Is a poem not a cultural object?” Cunniff asks in response. “Part of the value of an English department is that it teaches students to identify their own reactions to art, to literature, to culture, and to figure out why they’re having those reactions, and to be able to write intelligently about them.”

Several students from the class said they loved Swift’s music because she verbalized, at various moments of their lives, sentiments they felt they couldn’t express themselves. “She put into words exactly how I was feeling when I didn’t know how to say it,” says Chelsea Bohn-Pozniak ’27 about listening to “My Tears Ricochet” during a breakup. Describing a favorite lyric, Olivia Ma ’26 says, “I just—like, I can’t—that’s—I can’t think of a better way to say it.”

The class encourages students to go beyond recognizing their own emotions in Swift’s words, to ask how the lyrics, structure, and melody contribute to a song’s meaning: why a particular song elicits a particular emotional response. The chorus of “Is It Over Now?”, from 1989 (Taylor’s Version), appears simple on its surface: “Baby, was it over / When she laid down on your couch? / Was it over / When he unbuttoned my blouse?” But why do these lines work? First, Burt says, the music: “Like everything Taylor does, it needs the music behind it to be effective and memorable. Those words don’t work unless you’re singing them.” The symmetry of the chorus—two parallel scenes, each using the same notes and introductory words, separated by a “jump cut” with no transition—also indicate a symmetry in the relationship, marking a departure from Swift’s earlier music about love affairs where the man held more power.

Burt also points to the diction of the chorus as a sign of Swift’s ear for putting together words in surprising ways—specifically the use of “blouse” and “couch,” both quotidian objects outside of pop music’s traditional vocabulary. These two words allow students to examine how rhyme functions in music as opposed to poetry: “That’s not a full rhyme on the page, but it’s absolutely a full rhyme in a modern pop song,” Burt says, because the ending consonants are not plosive—they do not create a sudden stop in sound, as opposed to a word ending in a consonant like “t” or “p.”

One criticism of the course bothers Burt more than the others: “that this course is too popular, or that it’s for girls and not for adults”—in other words, that Swift’s wild popularity among young women (and subsequent popularity among that demographic at Harvard) signifies a lack of depth in her work. People who level such arguments “are not taking young people seriously,” Burt says. “They are treating young girls and teenagers as people not to be listened to and not to be trusted.”

Toward the end of the class’s syllabus is a New York Times Magazine article by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom.” In it, Brodesser-Akner argues that Swift’s music—often about people who want to control her, who want her to change, who want her to be ashamed of her past—offers women a path toward adulthood that doesn’t require repudiating their younger selves. “Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood,” Brodesser-Akner writes, “to understand that their womanhood is made up of these microchapters of change, that we’re not different people than we were then, that we shouldn’t disavow the earlier versions of ourselves.”

In a way, the Swift course seeks to do something similar: to tell students—some of whose love of words and storytelling was first kindled by her music—that they don’t have to leave her work behind, find it facile or immature, to engage with more challenging texts now.

The first week of the class focused on Swift’s self-titled debut album, released in 2006 when she was 16. Students studied the song “Tim McGraw,” a country ballad in which Swift implores an ex-boyfriend to remember her whenever he hears her favorite song by the (at the time) more famous country singer. The students examined the ways that Swift—originally from suburban Pennsylvania—constructed an identity as a rural, white, southern teenage girl. In class, Burt drew a comparison between “Tim McGraw” and pastoral poetry, a tradition that idealizes the imagined virtues of life in the countryside and spans from ancient Greece to sixteenth-century England.

“Professor Burt talked about how [Swift] combines that pastoral imagery with an authenticity that’s related to her own feelings as a teenage woman,” says Ma, a student in the class who studies classics and comparative literature. The comparison to the pastoral tradition reminded Ma of Virgil’s Georgics , another work about the countryside written for an urban audience, and classical Chinese poetry. Burt went on to argue, Ma says, that Swift “makes this fantasy seem a little more real by injecting her own emotions into it.” In a piece of writing where almost every detail is a fantasy, wobbly and unstable, the emotions of a teenage girl—so often dismissed as frivolous or unimportant—stand as the grounding element.

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I sat in on a Taylor Swift class at Harvard. Here's what I learned

Donning my backpack and a colorful spread of friendship bracelets on my wrist, I walked through the storied streets of Harvard University to Lowell Lecture Hall, built in 1902. It’s just as you’d imagine: A step back in time through brick, limestone and ornate doorways.

As a child, I dreamed of attending the renowned Ivy League school. And now, more than a decade since graduating high school, here was my chance … in a subject I know all too well .

Harvard’s new English class “Taylor Swift and Her World” is the brainchild of Professor Stephanie Burt — a Harvard and Yale alum, literary critic, poet, writer … and massive Swiftie. It’s almost as if the self-proclaimed head of Harvard’s “Tortured Poets Department ” was in Swift’s ear ahead of the pop star’s newly announced album (“The Tortured Poets Department”). Safe to say it will be required reading — or should I say listening? — for the class come April.

Monday mornings are quiet on most college campuses, even Harvard, as students slowly emerge from lively weekends spent with friends. But students arrived noticeably early to the noon class.

The twice-a-week, 75 minute-long lecture kicked off with some impromptu singing when one of the teaching assistants started playing Swift’s 2008 song “Love Story” on the piano.

The room of more than 200 people — from different years and majors — came to life in this bucket-list worthy class. Swifties have a reputation for being welcoming, and this class was no exception. Sitting front and center, I joined in, belting out, “I’ll be waiting, all there’s left to do is run” with my arms wrapped around neighboring students.

Already, this was proving to be a college class unlike any other. 

To those of you rolling your eyes, know that this class is far more than a dance party and series of clever puns. Now, look what you made me do. 

Rather, the class is a deep dive into Swift’s sweeping catalog and its cultural impact, closely examining themes and writing mechanisms that parallel literary greats from decades before. 

Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson and William Wordsworth are all on the reading list, along with watching Swift’s documentary “Miss Americana” and her 2022 NYU commencement speech . 

“We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts,” according to the syllabus, which is riddled with lyric references. “We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure.”

This week, the class was dissecting Swift’s second album, “Fearless,” before moving on to subsequent albums later.

As a songwriter, Swift is what poet and literary theorist Allen Grossman “calls a hermeneutic friend,” Burt said to the class.

Umm … a what ?

As if she heard my thoughts, Burt quickly clarified the “special English professor word.” She explained that in the song “Fifteen,” Swift establishes herself as the listener’s friend, someone who knows what you’re going through and can help guide you, like a fairy godmother. “Only not a god, not a mother, and not a fairy,” Burt quipped, to which the class chuckled. 

Even through complicated topics, the class’s energy never dulled. 

Swift had their attention … and Burt’s occasional lyrical dancing also helped. While she sang the lines, “Marry me Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” she got down on one knee.

Burt says the class situates Swift within a broader literary tradition.

“It is to connect these things to other artists who are currently more popular and to say, ‘If you like this, try that, if you enjoy studying this, try that,’” she says. “And that is how works of art survive.”

It’s that energizing effect that’s made the history-making dynamo academia’s new favorite subject — from a Swift-inspired psychology class at Arizona State University to an entrepreneurship course at UC Berkeley. 

Harvard’s Taylor Swift class saw so much demand, Burt sought out more teaching assistants on X, prompting responses from hundreds of eager Swifties. 

The TAs, whose expertise ranges from performance studies to copyright law and American literature, help run break-out discussion groups once a week and occasionally are featured in a lecture.

Matthew Jordan replied to Burt’s viral tweet when he was visiting Boston and scored the job with the help of his social media videos breaking down music theory of Swift’s critically acclaimed discography.

He was met by applause as he revealed his “Junior Jewels” shirt beneath his button-up, a reference to Swift’s “You Belong With Me” music video, before diving into the timeless principles of songwriting … like the use of the word you.

Jordan proceeded to go through all 13 of Swift’s songs on “Fearless” to point out how quickly you emerges.

• “Fifteen” — First line.
• “Breathe” — Third word.
• “You Belong With Me” — First word.

He explained Swift's use of “you” is all about getting the listener engaged and feeling part of the song. She’s singing about herself — and about the person hearing her song.

There are no exams in this course. But students do have to write evidence-based academic essays comparing Swift's discography to other literary works, as well as complete assignments that could take a creative form such as song or stage design.

A senior at Harvard told me she stayed up until 5 a.m. that day working on her thesis, but missing this class was out of the question. 

That is the power of Swift.  

And our trip to Harvard wouldn’t be complete without trading friendship bracelets, a Swiftie tradition popularized during the Eras Tour. 

I handed one student a bracelet spelling TODAY, and in return, she slipped a bracelet on my wrist that read “Fearless.”

In the words of Swift, I don’t know how it gets better than this.

Emilie Ikeda is an NBC News correspondent based in New York.

Taylor Swift at Harvard

Why the pop superstar’s work is worthy of study

Last month, Harvard announced that I would be teaching a class next semester called “Taylor Swift and Her World,” an open-enrollment lecture partly about Swift’s work and career and partly about literature (poems, novels, memoirs) that overlaps with, or speaks to, that work. When the news came out, my inbox blew up with dozens of requests, from as far away as New Zealand. Reporters wanted to know whether Swift would visit the course (not expecting her to), whether her online superfans were involved ( some will be ), whether Harvard approved (yes, at least so far), and, above all, why a Millennial pop star deserves this kind of treatment at a world-class university.

In some ways, the answer is simple. If the humanities ought to study culture, including the culture of the present day, and Taylor Swift is all over that culture, then of course we should ask why and how the Swift phenomenon came to be. That’s what a cultural historian of the future would do, looking back at how Americans embraced Swift as an artist, debated her rise, and changed their perceptions of her over time. It’s also what a cultural anthropologist would do, decoding the rituals around Swift’s concerts and album drops, or finding cross-cultural patterns in the way that her fans respond to her voice and her work.

I’m a literary critic, though. I write and teach, most often, about how individual works of art and artists function: how the parts of a piece of literature fit together, how they sound, what they say, and what they do for us when we read, hear, or see them. Does Taylor Swift really merit that kind of attention?

Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction

Again, yes. College English courses are of course meant to challenge students, but students also benefit from studying art that they love—art new and old, art in many genres. Works of art—unlike, say, protein-folding experiments or criminal-law trials—exist to move us, to delight us, to transform our emotional lives as well as to change our mind. As the literary scholar Rita Felski has argued , we can learn best about particular kinds of art, and why or whether they matter, by asking what they do to and for the people who love them—especially if those people are us.

My students will analyze Swift’s work, think in detail about it, maybe create footnotes to it, in order to see how the verbal skills and musical elements that move us are not just all in our head—they are choices Swift makes to communicate a particular message or feeling. Students will in turn gain tools for literary and cultural analysis that they can take along as they study other eras and other words, and hopefully discover more art that they love.

People love Taylor Swift for good reasons. She is a songwriter of genius, both as a lyricist and as a musician—one whose work is sophisticated enough to reward close study. Although it goes against a few generations of Dylanology, college classes on Beatles lyrics, and the like to say this, songs (at least in the era of recorded music) don’t work the way page-based poems do—no more so, at least, than novels work like stage plays or stand-up comedy works like memoirs. Taylor Swift writes witty, insightful, sometimes profound words that require tunes and music, and the music requires the words. I’m no musicologist, but I do know something about chords and melodies, and my class will look at how they drive and support her lyrics.

To take one example: Swift’s 2022 song “ Anti-hero ,” which addresses her public image and the way that both she and her fans have viewed her tumultuous, breakup-studded love life. The final line of the chorus—“It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero”—speaks to the status she knows she’s gained, as the target of both parasocial devotion and brickbats. She knows that her fans might be getting tired of defending her against every slight, but she surely feels exhausted too; she’s projecting . The song’s force comes through not just in the words but in the descending leaps that carry the vocal melody, ending the chorus a full octave plus a major third below the high me near where the chorus begins. The antihero gets a swift descent, and an anticlimax: She’s tired of her turmoil, and she knows we are too, but we keep watching.

Read: Taylor Swift’s Tinder masterpiece

I’m not the only one who believes Swift’s body of work fits this kind of analysis. (I’m not even the only college professor teaching a class about her .) My students will be reading my favorite literary writers’ pop-music criticism (Carl Wilson’s, for example), about Swift and other artists . We will be hearing and thinking about other pop-song writers whose skill sets overlap with Swift’s—some of them famous, like Dolly Parton and Prince, and others (Scott Miller, Marcy Mays, Keith Girdler) who had worse luck or fewer extramusical skills to navigate the star-making machinery.

I would not be teaching this course if I did not love Swift’s songs. But I would not be teaching this course, either, if I could not bring in other works of art, from other genres and time periods, that will help my students better understand Swift and her oeuvre. We will be reading two novels by Willa Cather about ambition, talent, and femininity in an earlier Middle America—novels about young women who want to become self-sustaining, recognized musicians, one who succeeds and one who fails. We will be reading James Weldon Johnson’s sharp-edged, irony-driven 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man , about a very different set of barriers for a young man who seeks musical success.

We will also look at three centuries of page-based poetry, meant to be read, not sung, on other topics central to Swift: childhood nostalgia and adulthood regret (William Wordsworth); girlhood, daughters, and heterosexual pessimism (Laura Kasischke); reactions to the haters and the low-down dirty cheats (Alexander Pope). I’ll take advantage, frankly, of a classroom full of Swifties to introduce hundreds of students to these poems. I will also help us attend to the way those poems describe being 15, or being 7, or being a constant target for unruly fans and resentful rivals in the streets of London—an experience that the Swift of her album Reputation shared with the Pope who wrote the great “ Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot .”

From the December 2020 issue: Stephanie Burt on Adrienne Rich

People (like me) who think that college English courses should study works of art we take pleasure in will, I hope, be happy with these choices. So will people (like me) who think that college English courses should build analytical skills that can be applied in other contexts. As for the people (unlike me) who think that college English classes should focus on classics, on works that have stood the test of time (how much time? whose test? what kinds of works?), I hope they’ll end up happy with this course too. If you want, and I do, more undergraduates to read Pope and Wordsworth, Cather and Johnson, you might notice how many students will come for the Taylor and stay for the other writers involved.

The course, if it works, isn’t just a way to write about and listen to lots of Swift. It’s a way into centuries of literary creation in novels and memoirs, page-based verse, and prose. It’s a way, too, into literary and cultural reception: What do fans do with the work and the artists they admire? That said, it’s also a way through the work of one particular artist, one who has shown many of us her life, and even our own life, in her songs—an artist worthy of study, an artist so many of us already love.

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I sat in on a Taylor Swift class at Harvard. Here's what I learned

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

Donning my backpack and a colorful spread of friendship bracelets on my wrist, I walked through the storied streets of Harvard University to Lowell Lecture Hall, built in 1902. It’s just as you’d imagine: A step back in time through brick, limestone and ornate doorways.

As a child, I dreamed of attending the renowned Ivy League school. And now, more than a decade since graduating high school, here was my chance … in a subject I know all too well .

Harvard’s new English class “ Taylor Swift and Her World” is the brainchild of Professor Stephanie Burt — a Harvard and Yale alum, literary critic, poet, writer … and massive Swiftie. It’s almost as if the self-proclaimed head of Harvard’s “Tortured Poets Department ” was in Swift’s ear ahead of the pop star’s newly announced album (“The Tortured Poets Department”). Safe to say it will be required reading — or should I say listening? — for the class come April.

Monday mornings are quiet on most college campuses, even Harvard, as students slowly emerge from lively weekends spent with friends. But students arrived noticeably early to the noon class.

The twice-a-week, 75 minute-long lecture kicked off with some impromptu singing when one of the teaching assistants started playing Swift’s 2008 song “Love Story” on the piano.

The room of more than 200 people — from different years and majors — came to life in this bucket-list worthy class. Swifties have a reputation for being welcoming, and this class was no exception. Sitting front and center, I joined in, belting out, “I’ll be waiting, all there’s left to do is run” with my arms wrapped around neighboring students.

Already, this was proving to be a college class unlike any other.

To those of you rolling your eyes, know that this class is far more than a dance party and series of clever puns. Now, look what you made me do. 

Rather, the class is a deep dive into Swift’s sweeping catalog and its cultural impact, closely examining themes and writing mechanisms that parallel literary greats from decades before.

Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson and William Wordsworth are all on the reading list, along with watching Swift’s documentary “Miss Americana” and her 2022 NYU commencement speech .

“We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts,” according to the syllabus, which is riddled with lyric references. “We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure.”

This week, the class was dissecting Swift’s second album, “Fearless,” before moving on to subsequent albums later.

As a songwriter, Swift is what poet and literary theorist Allen Grossman “calls a hermeneutic friend,” Burt said to the class.

Umm … a what ?

As if she heard my thoughts, Burt quickly clarified the “special English professor word.” She explained that in the song “Fifteen,” Swift establishes herself as the listener’s friend, someone who knows what you’re going through and can help guide you, like a fairy godmother. “Only not a god, not a mother, and not a fairy,” Burt quipped, to which the class chuckled.

Even through complicated topics, the class’s energy never dulled.

Swift had their attention … and Burt’s occasional lyrical dancing also helped. While she sang the lines, “Marry me Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” she got down on one knee.

Burt says the class situates Swift within a broader literary tradition.

“It is to connect these things to other artists who are currently more popular and to say, ‘If you like this, try that, if you enjoy studying this, try that,’” she says. “And that is how works of art survive.”

It’s that energizing effect that’s made the history-making dynamo academia’s new favorite subject — from a Swift-inspired psychology class at Arizona State University to an entrepreneurship course at UC Berkeley.

Harvard’s Taylor Swift class saw so much demand, Burt sought out more teaching assistants on X, prompting responses from hundreds of eager Swifties.

Ok I'm doing this. Our Taylor Swift course at Harvard is so popular that we need additional teaching assistants. If you live in the Boston/Providence metro, love Tay, & have *qualifications or experience to teach a writing intensive college course,* my DMs are open. — Stephanie Burt (Taylor's Version) (@accommodatingly) January 3, 2024

The TAs, whose expertise ranges from performance studies to copyright law and American literature, help run break-out discussion groups once a week and occasionally are featured in a lecture.

Matthew Jordan replied to Burt’s viral tweet when he was visiting Boston and scored the job with the help of his social media videos breaking down music theory of Swift’s critically acclaimed discography.

He was met by applause as he revealed his “Junior Jewels” shirt beneath his button-up, a reference to Swift’s “You Belong With Me” music video, before diving into the timeless principles of songwriting … like the use of the word you.

Jordan proceeded to go through all 13 of Swift’s songs on “Fearless” to point out how quickly you emerges.

“Fifteen” — First line.

“Breathe” — Third word.

“You Belong With Me” — First word.

He explained Swift's use of “you” is all about getting the listener engaged and feeling part of the song. She’s singing about herself — and about the person hearing her song.

There are no exams in this course. But students do have to write evidence-based academic essays comparing Swift's discography to other literary works, as well as complete assignments that could take a creative form such as song or stage design.

A senior at Harvard told me she stayed up until 5 a.m. that day working on her thesis, but missing this class was out of the question.

That is the power of Swift.

And our trip to Harvard wouldn’t be complete without trading friendship bracelets, a Swiftie tradition popularized during the Eras Tour.

I handed one student a bracelet spelling TODAY, and in return, she slipped a bracelet on my wrist that read “Fearless.”

In the words of Swift, I don’t know how it gets better than this.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com

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Teaching & Learning

Taylor’s version of copyright.

At a Harvard Law School event, an expert in digital exploitation of intellectual property says Taylor Swift singlehandedly shifted composition copyright considerations

When Taylor Swift began re-recording her old albums and releasing the new, improved “Taylor’s Version,” she did more than delight a nation of Swifties. She also opened significant questions about the role of intellectual property in contract law, and possibly tipped the balance toward artists.

According to Gary R. Greenstein , a technology transactions partner at Wilson Sonsini, the Swift affair is one of many that makes these times especially interesting for copyright law. Greenstein’s current practice focuses on intellectual property, licensing, and commercial transactions, with specialized expertise in the digital exploitation of intellectual property. He appeared at Harvard Law School on March 28 for a lunchtime talk, which was presented and introduced by Chris Bavitz , the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law and managing director of the law school’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “I have been doing this for 28 years now and there is never a dull moment,” Greenstein said.

Greenstein placed the Swift story in the larger context of music copyrights. In music, he explained, there are always two copyrights. The first is for the musical work itself, and this is usually controlled by the composer/songwriter, or by a publishing company acting on their behalf. The second is the “master,” the recorded performance of the work, and this is usually controlled by the label.

Whenever a song is played in public, one or both of these entities gets paid. In many cases, there are multiple copyright holders — the Bruno Mars hit “Uptown Funk” has six authors — or multiple recordings of the same songs (he noted that Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” has hundreds). “From a licensing point of view, this can be a nightmare,” Greenstein said.

In 2005, a teenaged Taylor Swift signed on to the Big Machine record label and became a global superstar by the time she left the company in 2018. By that time, she’d recorded six albums for the label, all multimillion sellers.

Soon afterward, Big Machine was purchased by her longtime business nemesis — “to Swifties, the hated Scooter Braun,” as Greenstein called him. (The two had longstanding bad blood, and Swift had referred to Braun as a bully and a manipulator). Braun in turn sold Big Machine, including the Swift albums it owned, to another company, Shamrock Holdings, for $420 million. Greenstein said that he was involved in the Big Machine deal but was not free to share details.

Rather than buy into this agreement, Swift announced she would remake the albums. Under her new record deal with Universal Music Group, she’d now own whatever masters she produced. Because she is usually the main songwriter, she would already have rights to the musical works. As the author and owner of her newest masters, Swift now has majority control of her work. Hence, Greenstein said, he’d need to pay Swift royalties if he played one of her songs during the lecture.

No major artist had previously invested the time and energy to re-record their catalogue, but Swift’s move paid off, as the new versions were major commercial and critical successes. When Greenstein asked the class whether they listened to the originals or to Taylor’s Version, most picked the latter.

“Does that sound good to Shamrock Holdings?” he asked, to negative response. “Congratulations,” Greenstein said, “You just passed Contracts 101.”

As a result, he said, Shamrock now owned something far less valuable. They could still sell the original albums, but there is now less demand for them. And because Swift holds licensing rights as the creator of the musical work, she can make sure that the lucrative licensing deals (for movies, television, etc.) go to her own versions rather than Big Machine’s.

Of the six Big Machine albums, the only two she hasn’t yet re-recorded are the first, called “Taylor Swift,” and the last, “Reputation.” Thus, according to one of Greenstein’s slides, “All she has left to recover are her name and ‘Reputation.’”

It’s significant, Greenstein said, that the first Taylor’s Version wasn’t released until she’d been off Big Machine for three years. Until then, she was legally bound not to re-record any of the material, and this time frame was typical of record deals in the past. But this is the part of the equation that Swift likely changed for good.

“For decades, major labels were somewhat rational when it came to the prohibition of re-recordings,” Greenstein said.  “But now they’re going to be asking, ‘What’s the risk of a Taylor’s Version?’”

In response, record companies are now trying to prohibit re-recordings for 20 or 30 years, not just two or three. And this has become a key part of contract negotiations. “Will they get 30 years? Probably not, if the lawyer is competent. But they want to make sure that the artist’s vocal cords are not in good shape by the time they get around to re-recording.”

This, he noted, begged the question of why an artist would even want to sign a record contract in the age of TikTok and Spotify. “Number one, there is the pride involved. If you were The Who in the ’60s, you could trash a hotel room and the label would clean up the mess. Of course it would come out of future royalties, but they would do it. But what you have to ask yourself is, is it worth it?”

This may not be an issue for most artists who sign to record labels — but it likely will be for a select few.

“Very few people have the power of a Taylor Swift, but nobody knows who the next Taylor Swift will be,” Greenstein said. “So, if you are a lawyer, you will represent your client zealously.”

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Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholars Have Thoughts on ‘Tortured Poets’

The students taking Harvard University’s class on the singer are studying up. Their final papers are due at the end of the month.

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By Madison Malone Kircher

Fans of Taylor Swift often study up for a new album, revisiting the singer’s older works to prepare to analyze lyrics and song titles for secret messages and meanings .

“The Tortured Poets Department” is getting much the same treatment, and perhaps no group of listeners was better prepared than the students at Harvard University currently studying Ms. Swift’s works in an English class devoted entirely to the artist . The undergraduate course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” is taught by Stephanie Burt, who has her students comparing Ms. Swift’s songs to works by poets and writers including Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

On Thursday night, about 50 students from the class gathered in a lecture hall on campus to listen to Ms. Swift’s new album. Mary Pankowski, a 22-year-old senior studying history of art and architecture, wore a cream sweatshirt she bought at Ms. Swift’s Eras tour last year. The group made beaded friendship bracelets to celebrate the new album, she said.

When the clock struck midnight, the classroom erupted into applause, and the analysis began. First, the group listened through the album once without discussing, just taking it all in.

Certain lines, however, immediately caused a stir, said Samantha Wilhoit, a junior studying government — like a reference to the singer Charlie Puth and the scathing lyrics to the song “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Ms. Wilhoit, 21, said.

A line from the song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” in which Ms. Swift sings, “I cry a lot but I am so productive,” also seemed to resonate, Ms. Wilhoit said, laughing.

A smaller group of students, including Ms. Pankowski, stuck it out until the early hours of the morning waiting to see if Ms. Swift would drop additional music. At 2 a.m., they were rewarded with an additional “volume” of 15 tracks called “The Anthology.” Ms. Pankowski said she didn’t go to sleep until hours later.

Speaking with The New York Times together on a video call Friday morning, several students from the class discussed their thoughts on the 31 new songs and brainstormed their final papers, which are due at the end of the month.

“The song ‘Clara Bow’ reminded me of ‘The Song of the Lark,’” Makenna Walko, 19, said, citing the Willa Cather novel that follows the career of an aspiring opera singer, Thea Kronborg. “She’s talking about a girl trying to make it out of her small town and trying to get to Manhattan, and what it’s like to have these big, musical dreams and try to pursue them,” she continued. “That’s a narrative that has shown up a lot in Taylor’s own life, over the course of her own career. In a lot of ways, it’s Taylor’s story, too.”

Lola DeAscentiis, a sophomore, zeroed in on the song “But Daddy I Love Him,” comparing it to the Sylvia Plath poem “Daddy.” She plans to explore the link in her final paper.

“I hesitate to say that the song was anywhere near the genius of Sylvia Plath — no offense to Taylor Swift — but I can definitely see some similarities in the themes, like sadness, depression and mental health,” Ms. DeAscentiis, 20, said. (Ms. DeAscentiis also drew a distinction between being a fan of Ms. Swift and being a devoted Swiftie. She said she identified as the former.)

“The way that Taylor overlays her relationship with the significant other that she’s talking about in the song with the relationship that she has with her father — I think that was very Plath,” she added.

Another student, Ana Paulina Serrano, echoed Ms. DeAscentiis, noting that the class had learned about the genre of confessional poetry. “Is Taylor considered a confessional poet?” Ms. Serrano, a 21-year-old junior majoring in neuroscience, asked the group on the call. In support of her own position, she offered as evidence Ms. Swift’s song “Mastermind,” a track off “Midnights,” in which Ms. Swift reveals herself to have calculated and plotted the outcome of a relationship.

“Sometimes she’s confessing things that we, like, already knew or assumed, but she often seems to feel this need to explicitly tell us,” Ms. Serrano added.

Isabel Levin, a 23-year-old senior studying integrative biology, said she thought Ms. Swift’s delivery on several tracks had a spoken-word quality. She wondered if maybe some of the lyrics had initially begun not as songs but as more traditional poems.

Ms. Swift has said she categorizes her songs by the type of pen she imagines using to write each. A “frivolous, carefree, bouncy” song is a glitter gel pen song, while a fountain pen song might be more “brutally honest,” according to Ms. Swift . Quill pen songs are “all old-fashioned, like you’re a 19th-century poet crafting your next sonnet by candlelight,” she explained during her acceptance speech as songwriter-artist of the decade at the Nashville Songwriter Awards in 2022.

And with what implement might Ms. Swift have written “Tortured Poets?”

Quill pen, for sure, Ms. Walko said.

Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture. More about Madison Malone Kircher

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .

Professor of Taylor Swift Class at Harvard on Why the Pop Star's Work Is Worthy of Study

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The  Taylor Swift  class being offered at Harvard next semester is officially titled "English 183ts. Taylor Swift and Her World." It's not the first time a Taylor Swift class is available at an institution of higher learning. Stanford, NYU and the University of Texas at Austin are just some of the universities offering similar courses.

But when Hahvid announced last month that it would offer such a class, many began to wonder out loud if a "millennial pop star deserves this kind of treatment at a world-class university."

Stephanie Burt, a literary critic who will teach the course at Harvard, penned a convincing argument in The Atlantic  and deftly argued that students "benefit from studying art that they love -- art new and old, art in many genres."

The hour-long class at Harvard will aim to explore Swift's many genres and the economic impact she's had in cities across the world when she arrives to perform her Eras Tour. The class will also examine her catalogue (Taylor's Version).

"We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure. We will look at her precursors, from Dolly Parton to the Border Ballads, and at work about her (such as the documentary Miss Americana )," the class synopsis continues. "And we will read literary works important to her and works about song and performance, with novels, memoirs and poems by (among others) Willa Cather, James Weldon Johnson, Tracey Thorn, and William Wordsworth."

Burt says her students "will analyze Swift's work, think in detail about it, maybe create footnotes to it, in order to see how the verbal skills and musical elements that move us are not just all in our head -- they are choices Swift makes to communicate a particular message or feeling."

Touting the Midnights singer's writing as "witty" and "insightful," Burt says it's incumbent upon her to also help her students better understand Swift and her "oeuvre" with the help of novels by Willa Cather and James Weldon Johnson. The class will also dive into three centuries of "page-based poetry ... on other topics central to Swift."

In doing so, Burt hopes to "take advantage ... of a room full of Swifties to introduce hundreds of students to these poems."

If all goes well, "you might notice how many students will come for the Taylor and stay for the other writers involved," Burt argues.

Famed author James Patterson on Saturday also weighed in on the Harvard course , and he says the class is a no-brainer. 

"Hey there, #Swifties. Should @taylorswift be taught at Harvard?" the Women's Murder Club author asked on Instagram. "That seems to be the plan in Cambridge, so why not? Her career is stunning, an object lesson for success. She's not only an amazing entertainer, she's a very smart business person. Would I take the course? Well, I might audit it."

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Taylor Swift: Harvard’s Version

Fourteen years later, and Burt is still a diehard Swiftie. Her interest in Swift has followed her to the classroom. Next semester, Harvard’s English Department will debut the course “Taylor Swift and Her World,” taught by Burt. In this class, students will earn college credit for their deep dives into Swift’s lyrics, music, and influence, dissecting her catalog and reading a host of authors Burt finds relevant to understanding Swift’s artistry.

Swift is one of the biggest artists of the 21st century. She is the most streamed female musician on Spotify, has won 12 Grammy awards, and her recent Eras tour is shaping up to be the biggest tour in music history.

Still, some might be confused as to how Swift found her way onto a Harvard syllabus. But according to Burt, Swift engages with the literary canon, sometimes directly naming influences and muses in her music. For example, in her song “The Lakes” she sings the line “tell me what are my Wordsworth” in reference to the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.

To Burt, Swift’s lyrics are an open invitation to discover these cultural touchstones. She understands Swift to be saying, “If you want to understand me better, and my time in England better, maybe you should go read some Wordsworth,” Burt says.

“And you know what, I would love to help you do that,” she adds.

Behind the course is an intentional pedagogy: Instead of teaching entirely new material, Burt hopes to give students a chance to critique art they already love.

“I try to teach only the courses that I think our students can really use — either because students want them or because our curriculum needs them,” Burt says.

The course seeks to add context and richness to the celebrity of Swift — a task especially prescient for Harvard Swifties who may have had little formal introduction to literary and aesthetic analysis.

But even with this focus on Swift, students won’t be able to write every essay on how “My Tears Ricochet” just “Hits Different.” Instead, Burt aspires to place Swift in a broader context of American art and literature.

Required readings span from Willa Cather’s portrait of the female artist in “The Song of the Lark” and James Weldon Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” — a novel dissecting issues of race and class in the post-Reconstruction South. Some of the works aim to address the urban-rural divide in America; the syllabus states students will learn “how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.”

Burt plans to track broader shifts in American culture through the lens of Swift’s career. Swift is known for her well-documented shift from the country genre to pop music, which coincided with her move from Nashville to Manhattan. Burt intends to explore this move in the context of the South’s shifting relationship with the rest of the United States.

“Taylor Swift is someone who establishes complicated and changing relationships to the idea of Americanness and to the idea of white Americanness and of middle America,” Burt says.

Swift’s evolving relationships with class, region, and identity have sparked a range of political conversations. Despite her initial trajectory as an artist focused solely on music-making, Swift has become well-known for her political activism after facing pushback for her silence during the 2016 elections. She has championed women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, releasing anthems like “The Man” and “You Need To Calm Down” on her 2019 album “Lover.” She was also heralded as a major influence in the #MeToo movement.

Through her course, Burt asserts that this influence on politics and culture is worthy of study and analysis. After all, students will spend at least one paper delving into “the songwriting, singing, performance, or life and career of Taylor Swift.”

“We are lucky enough to be living in a time when one of our major artists is also one of the most famous people on the planet,” Burt says. “Why would you not have a course on that?”

Because of Swift’s widespread popularity, Burt expects the course will have wide engagement. “I could probably teach extraordinarily niche courses that four people would take,” Burt adds. “I don’t want to do that.”

Most of all, Burt hopes this course will speak personally to Harvard students. “Taylor Swift is a good way to think about what it’'s like to have a lot of eyes on you and to wonder what you do with your privilege,” Burt says. “To look around and ask, ‘I’m pretty ambitious and I got to this place when I was pretty young. What do I do next? What do I do with all this attention?’”

She pauses. “I think that’s very Harvard.”

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Who cares what taylor swift thinks.

Rumors say pop superstar Taylor Swift will soon encourage her fans to vote for President Biden in the November election.

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Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Lots of people! But that doesn’t mean she can sway an election.

Speculation that Taylor Swift will endorse President Biden for re-election immediately after the Super Bowl has been amplified on social media and by conservative news outlets in recent weeks, stirring outrage among some on the right toward the singer-songwriter. For her part, Swift has given no indication that she intends to make such an announcement.

Even if she did, why would a pop superstar coming out in support of a political candidate provoke such a strong reaction? Sure, Swift has millions of fans who buy her music, flock to her concerts, and follow the daily ups and downs of her love life like investors do the stock market. But when it comes to voting, does anyone really care what Swift or other celebrities think about an election?

Kevin DeLuca , Ph.D. ’23, is an assistant professor of political science at Yale who has studied the impact of newspaper endorsements on politics. He spoke with the Gazette about the declining power of endorsements in this deeply partisan climate and whether Swift’s approval could meaningfully influence the 2024 presidential election. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Do endorsements still matter or have they lost the power to persuade voters like they once did?

I tend to focus on three things, at least with newspapers. But I think these apply to a Taylor Swift endorsement, as well.

The first is, what does the audience or the potential audience already know about the issue? One reason newspaper endorsements were good is people didn’t know a lot about their local candidates and the endorsements would teach them something about the candidate. If you think about Taylor Swift and the presidential election: People already know a lot about Biden and Trump; it’s not clear that a Taylor Swift endorsement teaches them anything. It’s going to be really hard for anyone to convince anyone to change their presidential vote, including Taylor Swift.

The second thing to think about: The public is super polarized on these issues. And so, even a potentially influential endorsement has a lot of work to do to get someone to change their mind. The pool of persuadable people is really, really small now. And then, the people who are potentially persuadable and receptive to Taylor Swift, in particular — that’s another subset. So, in aggregate, those two things are working against it.

The third thing is the informativeness. I think of it as the “surprising-ness” of an endorsement; the unexpectedness of it. A Democratic governor endorsing a Democratic candidate — not that surprising. But if a Democratic governor supports a Republican candidate, that’s potentially useful for voters. This Republican has the support of a Democrat — maybe he’s good in some way? You might think they’re making their endorsement based on candidate quality rather than just partisanship.

I don’t think anyone, Democrats or Republicans, would be surprised if Taylor Swift endorsed the Democrat. It’s already expected, in a way. It’s already been built into people’s decisions and information, so we’re not really learning much from that endorsement.

Can political scientists measure a specific endorsement’s influence in an election?

It would be very hard. The best-case scenario for finding an effect would be: There are some voters who already lean Democrat and are maybe not that plugged into politics; they’re not planning on voting. And Taylor Swift comes out and says, “It’s really important, you should go vote. You should vote for Democrats.” And then they decide to register to vote and to turn out. That’s a small group, I think, and they’re going to be spread out across all 50 states, so they’re going to have a small effect. I think that’s the avenue where we would see something — with turnout, with registration, that sort of thing. I’m still skeptical at the national presidential level that it’s a significant difference.

Are some demographic groups more receptive to endorsements than others?

Theoretically. In one paper where the researchers looked at presidential endorsements, they found that independents are more open to them. And it makes sense, because they’re not necessarily in one camp or the other. An endorsement from someone they like might help tip the scales a little bit. In general, the biggest divide is going to be with high-information voters who already know a lot about politics. They’re going to be the least persuadable either way. Whereas a low-info person — maybe you’re a big fan of Taylor Swift, but you’re not really into politics — those people are the ones who might be susceptible to that sort of thing.

I think of it from the voters’ perspective: What new information are they learning? If it’s an expected endorsement, like a Democrat endorsing a Democrat, you’re not really learning much. If you already know a lot about the candidates, it’s hard to teach you new things.

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A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

The New York Times  recently interviewed Stephanie Burt about her course, "Taylor Swift and Her World." The article delves into Professor Burt's affinity for Swift's songs and the coursework students will complete. An excerpt is included below:  "The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.

Taylor Swift.

In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, 'Taylor Swift and Her World.' Nearly 300 students have enrolled."  Read more  here .

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Taylor Swift Becomes An MBA Case Study

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The Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville

Taylor Swift is everywhere – even in the MBA curriculum.

The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business announced a new case, titled “ Shamrock Capital: Pricing the Masters of Taylor Swift .” It offers an in-depth look at both the human and business factors that Shamrock Capital—an investment fund that paid $300 million for Swift’s old music—had to consider when evaluating the purchase of Taylor Swift’s masters in 2020.

The case revolves around a highly publicized controversy that began in 2019, when Scooter Braun acquired Big Machine Records, Swift’s original record label. Swift retained the publishing rights to her songs, but the label still owned her performance recordings. Throughout the controversy, Swift was vocal about her dissatisfaction over Braun’s ownership of her masters.

“This is my worst-case scenario,” she told Variety . “This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept.”

A STUDY OF MASTER RECORDING VALUATION

The new case, which will be taught at Darden in the core finance curriculum, is essentially an intro to firm valuation using discounted-cash-flow (DCF), market multiples, and the perpetuity model for terminal value estimation.

The case is designed with four key learning objectives:

1) Introduce firm valuation techniques based on a simple DCF model or market multiples.

2) Stimulate an appreciation and understanding of the perpetuity model for estimating terminal value.

3) Estimate the cost of capital using industry comparables.

4) Build intuition about the relationship between firm growth, operating profitability, and value creation.

Students studying the case will examine the financial decision-making in conditions of uncertainty and learn the basics of firm valuation technique. The case will serve as the introductory case for Darden’s course Valuation in Financial Markets.

Sources: Darden School of Business , Rolling Stone

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Taylor Swift has got the 1830s all wrong

Lecturer in Law, University of Liverpool

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Emily Ireland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Taylor Swift has become incredibly popular as a documenter of her dating history. But in her new album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, she tries her hand at writing about actual history.

In the second verse of “I Hate it Here” (track 23 on the mammoth 31-track anthology version of the album), Swift sings about playing a game that involves selecting a past decade to live in instead of the present.

I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists And getting married off for the highest bid

The internet was quick to criticise the line, arguing that Swift’s vague reference to “all the racists” suggests a lack of reflection on the historical injustices experienced by people of colour throughout history. Many saw it as a minimisation of the atrocities of the era of slavery. They also pointed out that it would be impossible to remove “all the racists” from the 1830s as if it were a case of removing a few bad apples from a barrel.

Racism was enmeshed into the fabric of 19th-century society in Britain and the US. The 1830s without racism is what some might call a blank slate. Those seeking to redress the balance pointed out that Swift does say it’s a silly game and she’d actually hate it in the 19th century in the song itself.

I think Swift’s intentions were good, but as a legal historian, I can’t overlook the lyric because it’s not just controversial, it’s historically inaccurate. The line about women “getting married off for the highest bid” scrambles the realities experienced by two distinct groups of people in a way that amplifies the curtailed legal status of women and minimises the lack of rights of people of colour during the 1830s.

First of all, women were never married off for the highest bid.

Bidding suggests a proprietary exchange, but despite the popular perception, married women in Britain and the US have never been considered the property of their husbands. A doctrine called coverture ensured that when a woman got married, her real estate became her husband’s forever and her moveable property (money, livestock, debts, for instance) was passed to her husband during his lifetime.

Coverture also prevented a married woman from forming a contract, running a business, becoming bankrupt, and suing in a common law court without her husband. Coverture endured until the Married Women’s Property Acts were passed in the late-19th century in Britain. In the US, reform was piecemeal, with laws passed at the state level across the 19th century. In short, women’s rights were reduced upon marriage in the 1830s, but a wife was never considered property herself.

Perhaps I have taken Swift’s lyrics too literally. If the line is a metaphor, however, it is an unfortunate one, because you know who was considered property in the 1830s? Enslaved people.

Most pre-abolition case law involving enslaved people revolved around contracts made for their purchase. Somerset’s case (1772) in Britain concerned the personhood of James Somerset, an enslaved African, and confirmed the status of enslaved people as property.

In referencing generic “racism” but specifically (and falsely) mentioning “getting married off for the highest bid”, Swift foregoes any specificity as to the plight of people of colour in the 1830s. She also references something that very much happened, but in the context of the wrong people.

It wasn’t (relatively) privileged white women who were auctioned off, but enslaved Africans. By conflating the two distinct legal positions of married women and enslaved people – the two groups implicitly referenced in her lyrics – Swift skips over the worst parts of slavery and overemphasises the worst parts of coverture.

To give Swift some credit, she does pick the decade in which slavery was abolished in Britain. The Slave Trade Act 1807 abolished the trade in enslaved people. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 then replaced slavery with unpaid apprenticeships (that were gradually phased out) and provided a generous compensation scheme for slavers. Slavery in the US, however, continued until the 13th amendment to the constitution was ratified in 1865.

Some do, however, think Swift should dip her toe into history. Holly Genovese, a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Texas, reckons Swift should be considered an activist public historian , while social historian Jonathan Healy forwards a conspiracy that the album 1989 is, in fact, a concept album about Henry VIII . Ultimately, if Swift wishes to pursue an alternative career in public history she might want to check her lyrics a little more closely.

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