Are you “…Ready for it?” 

An English course offered on the Tampa campus will concentrate on Taylor Swift for the first time in the fall. 

The course, LIT3301: Cultural Studies and Popular Art, has been offered before as an English elective, but can be taken by students of any major.

The class concentrates on a subject within popular culture, including the Harry Potter series or monsters in fiction in the past. It has not focused on musical artists until now.

Jessica Cook, Emily Jones and Michelle Taylor are English professors collaborating to teach three sections of LIT3301 in the fall, all focusing on Swift. They will meet on Tuesday and Thursday from 9:30 to 10:45 a.m. 

The course was born out of a conversation between the three over lunch while analyzing the lyrics of “Begin Again” by Swift. 

“We realized after we’d been talking for a few minutes, that this is the kind of thing our students do,” Jones said. “We could teach a course on this.”

We keep you informed. Help support us

Classes on Tuesday will be team-taught through broad lectures by Cook, Jones and Taylor in CHE101, an auditorium in the Chemistry building. 

Classes on Thursday will meet in smaller classrooms in Cooper Hall. They will be individually taught by each professor through break-out discussions, depending on which section is registered for, according to Jones.

Students can register for any of the three sections – CRN 96126, 96127 and 96128 – but will all have the same class on Tuesdays. On Thursdays, students will meet with the professor they registered for individually for more intimate class discussions on the broader themes of the course.

Since class registration began on March 25, 40 students have signed up for each section of LIT3301, according to Taylor. There are 54 seats remaining as of the time of publication.

The structure of the course has not been finalized yet, according to Jones. The three have all agreed to individually study an album or two and have considered discussing themes across albums, Cook said.

“After [her new album] comes out in [4] days, we might change some of our ideas,” Taylor said. “That might…restructure thinking about each album as its own work of art and how it fits in the album’s interactions with each other.”

Swift’s music will also be compared to literary influences from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson to Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Byron, according to Cook. 

Music videos will be shown and analyzed in class, and Swift’s impact on music and fan culture will be discussed, Taylor said.

Although coursework has not been finalized, traditional and creative assignments such as literary analysis of Swift’s songs and potentially songwriting will be taught, according to Jones.

The course is open to all majors and its only prerequisites are English Composition 1 and 2.

Jones recommends students register as soon as possible due to the course’s anticipated popularity.

“Get your Eras tour tickets early,” Jones said.