When I started my podcast, Studies in Taylor Swift, in the spring of 2021, I felt that I was simultaneously helping to invent, and trying to catch up to, the academic discipline of Taylor Swift studies. Though there wasn’t much published on reading Swift as literature, I had no trouble finding guests who had some kind of experience teaching Swift or thinking academically about her lyrics.
I went on to design a summer school course at Queen Mary University of London on Taylor Swift and Literature in 2023. My course made the news – but only because a journalist writing about a similar class at Ghent University in Belgium got in touch, asking me to confirm that my class had been taught first. In fact, a class at The University of Texas at Austin in 2022 was the first literature class on Swift to gain media attention.
