A course dedicated to Beyoncé is coming to Yale University.
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The course is named Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music, and will examine Beyoncé’s work from her 2013 self-titled album to 2024’s ‘Cowboy Carter‘, as a lens to study Black history, intellectual thought and performance.
Students will participate in screenings of the ‘Drunk In Love’ singer’s visual albums, discussions on works about her from various scholars, crafting playlists linking her discography to her musical predecessors and more.
Speaking to the Yale Daily News, Daphne Brooks, professor of African American Studies and Music, highlighted the recent US election as a prime opportunity to recognise and study Beyoncé’s contributions to American culture.
“The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetics and her utilisation of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her,” she said.
A host of university classes dedicated to pop stars have cropped up in recent years. Taylor Swift in particular has been the subject of many, including a Psychology of Taylor Swift course at Arizona State University, a class at Stanford University dissecting Swift’s ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ and a UC Berkeley course which explores the business success of the pop star – all announced last year alone.
Before that, in February 2022, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute launched a course that covered “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”.
The following August, the University of Texas kicked off a course titled The Taylor Swift Songbook, which used “the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods-basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines.”
Other artists given the university treatment include Kanye West, who was the subject of a course at Montreal’s Concordia University in 2022. Titled Kanye vs. Ye: Genius By Design, the course looked into the rapper’s career – from his beginnings as a producer in Chicago to his rise to fame via albums like ‘College Dropout’ and ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.’
And, earlier this year, Stanford University offered an online course on the music and culture of The Grateful Dead.
In other Beyoncé news, the singer will bring her latest album ‘Cowboy Carter’ to the NFL Christmas-day Halftime Show this December, as confirmed by Netflix earlier this month.
She will be performing midway through this year’s Christmas game between the Houston Texas and Baltimore Ravens on December 25, in an event that will be livestreamed on Netflix.
