The eternally recurring news of Taylor Swift classes

and specifically mine

Hello,

As you know, I am writing my book (like Taylor Swift) and not newsletters, because I don’t have time. But I wanted to write about something curious that happened to me this week.

The British tabloid The Mirror reported this weekend on a module I created: “EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Swift-inspired course at university compares her songs to Shakespeare's poems.” This was also reported on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, based on the dubious grounds of this article. So far so good, I like fame.

The problem is that, in fact, this is not a newly announced module, but the third iteration of my popular summer school class Taylor Swift and Literature. I should say that the article is careful not to explicitly say that this class is being offered for the first time, and perhaps they mean that this year’s iteration of the class is now open to applications, but this is not what a casual reader would get out of reading this article. As it says near the end, “Last year a Belgian university launched one of the first classes inspired by the Love Story singer” - yeah, after my class had already run for the first time. I would not (loving fame as I do) mind this article being written if it were made clear in it at some point that my class is a yearly fixture but it’s a bit galling to have it presented as a new and belated invention. I am having flashbacks to the time when, a month or two after I first ran my summer school module, another newspaper ran an article about the class headlined “Taylor Swift course to be offered at Queen Mary University of London” and ignoring the fact it had already happened. At least they didn’t call it an exclusive.

Why does this happen? Well, each year’s Queen Mary summer school offerings are released online in September. The first time my class was available, with applications open in 2022 for summer 2023, a class on Swift was not something anyone recognized as news. But then that Belgian class made headlines starting the semester after my class ran for the first time, just as applications opened for the second year of my module. This time my module became news because it fit into a recognized trend of universities offering classes on Swift. But it had to presented as a new thing because it wasn’t news the first time it happened. My class generated a fair amount of media attention over the last year. This time, my class is being reported on as evidence that the study of Swift’s work as literature is “happening all over the place” - as yet another class on Swift, joining the ranks of other classes on Swift, evidence of Swift’s ever-growing popularity as she conquers the whole of academia (except that in this case the unfortunate truth is that this is just the same old class, being, as classes tend to do, offered again the next year).

What’s news? I’ll leave that to the journalists. What I can say is that there’s nothing actually new here.

(You can read my thoughts about Shakespeare’s name being used in headlines about Swift classes here, which is a separate issue and arguably more important.)

Overall I think this is not a huge deal. It matters to me personally because of my fragile ego that people know when my class was first offered becauseI want people to know that I am not a latecomer to this field (and also, this is my career and I make money off teaching and writing about Swift so I want people to recognize that I’ve been doing this for a while). I do think though that there is a larger issue of principle because inevitably this kind of thing muddles the journalistic record. Over the last year or two, I have spoken to journalists who seemed confused and doubtful when I told them that I had taught the class before and that it had, in fact, not just been announced for the first time, as if they didn’t believe me and thought I might be trying to trick them. How are people supposed to understand anything if even in the relatively simple realm of the academic study of Swift the false keeps getting overlaid over the true?

(It is entirely possible I am just bad at talking to journalists / people.)

Anyway, I hope you are all doing well and not being misrepresented by the news media.

Best,

Clio

p.s. Taylor knew this would happen when she told us in her wordplay on British tabloid titles to “stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.”