Students at Yale University are getting the chance to take a class entirely devoted to Beyoncé, school officials have announced.
The class – titled Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music – will be taught by the African American studies and music professor Daphne Brooks beginning in the upcoming spring semester.
Brooks, who co-founded Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, previously taught a class called Black Women in Popular Music Culture at Princeton, which like Yale, is an Ivy League institution. But it will be her first class focused solely on the pop superstar who – among other accolades – has won 32 Grammy awards and has attained a level of political influence few in the music industry have.
Brooks’s new college course offering is bound to become the latest to examine a pop culture icon’s impact. Universities have also offered classes on Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Harrison Ford.
Brooks told the Guardian there had been “waves and waves of excitement – from undergraduates as well as graduate students” about the class, as well as from “fellow colleagues and staff”.
She said Yale required no convincing to green-light the class, adding: “This is the first opportunity I’ve had to focus an entire lecture course on the truly astonishing and marked socio-political and intellectual shift in Beyoncé’s repertoire since her 2013 self-titled album.
“I’m looking forward to exploring her body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, Black feminist politics, Black liberation politics and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire as well as the ways that her unprecedented experimentations with the album form, itself, have provided her with the platform to mobilize these themes.”
Beyoncé’s direct involvement in politics is minimal. But she always attracts major news headlines when she does get involved.
She sang at Barack Obama’s presidential inaugurations in 2009 and 2013.
More recently, she gave Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful presidential campaign this year permission to use her song Freedom as its anthem.
She also formally endorsed Harris and made an appearance at her rally in a packed stadium in her home town of Houston, Texas, where fans were hoping that she would perform, though she did not.
“I’m not here as a celebrity,” Beyoncé – one of the top streamed artists of all time – said at the rally. “I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother – a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in.”
Classes like the one Yale is offering on Beyoncé often draw significant student interest. The Taylor Swift and her World class at Harvard enrolled 300 students when it was first offered earlier this year.
Brook’s Beyoncé class will be offered by multiple departments, including those of African American studies, women’s gender and sexuality studies and American studies and music.
