Texas State University has announced plans to introduce a course on popstar Harry Styles next year
(Picture: Getty Images)A university in the US has announced plans to introduce a new course about singer Harry Styles in spring 2023.
Associate professor of digital history at Texas State University, Louie Dean Valencia, revealed on Twitter that the course will be called “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture”.
According to Professor Valencia’s announcement, the class will focus on the former One Direction star and popular European culture to “understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture and consumerism.”
The coursework will count towards studies in European or world history, international studies, pop culture, diversity and women’s and gender studies.
It's official, official. I'm teaching the world's first ever university course on the work of #HarryStyles is happening Spring 2023 at @TXST University (see description).
— Louie Dean Valencia (@BurntCitrus) July 16, 2022
This is what tenure looks like. Let's gooooo! 😊 pic.twitter.com/1z3vMZoxRV
Valencia elaborated further on the syllabus during an interview with local TV station KXAN.
He said: “The way I like to describe the class is that it’s really about the history of the last 12 years or so. So, it is about Harry Styles in the same way that some classes are about the Beatles and you might take a class like that to learn about, ‘What were the ‘60s like?’”
“This class will give you an idea of questions around globalism, issues around gender, sexuality, race, and really trying to kind of peel apart how did we become a part of the world that we’re living in today?”
Adding: “As a historian, I want the class to get to really see how the world has changed in the last 12 years or so, but also how to put that into historical context, through the lens of Harry Styles, and how they can learn from him and his art, activism and philosophy, like any great artist.”
Styles isn’t the first musician to get an entire course dedicated to his career.
Earlier this year, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute offered a special course on Taylor Swift.
Taught by Rolling Stone journalist Brittany Spanos, it aimed to explore Swift’s “evolution as a creative music entrepreneur, the legacy of pop and country songwriters, discourses of youth and girlhood, and the politics of race in contemporary popular music”.
