Taylor Swift's 150th performance, the last stop on The Eras Tour, will take place on Dec. 8 at Vancouver's B.C. Place Stadium.
Swift has sold over $1 billion worth of tickets during her 60-date, five-continent tour since her debut performance in Glendale, Arizona.
While the Eras Tour is ending, one B.C. university is entering its "Taylor Swift Era."
Starting January 2025, the University of Victoria will be offering a course on the newly minted billionaire.
English 240 – Major Author: Taylor Swift, will debut under Dr. Stephen Ross. The pop phenomenon will be thoroughly examined in the course, focusing on her brilliant lyricism.
While balancing his other teaching responsibilities, Ross spent the majority of his fall semester perfecting the syllabus in preparation for the course, which he has been working on for several months.
“It’s exciting and a little daunting,” he says. “There’s a shockingly large amount to learn about Taylor Swift – not just her songs but other aspects of her creative work.”
The professor points out that Swift has become more 'literary' since releasing her albums Reputation and Lover, incorporating more references and allusions from authors such as Daphne Du Maurier, F. Scott Fitzgerald and American poet Sylvia Plath into her songs.
“It’s an interesting progression across her career and we’re gonna be talking about that through the term."
Last June, a poster of the course created by Ross’s daughter began circulating online, with some calling it “academic clickbait.”
Is it, though? "Yes, and no," he responded. Literary studies, especially English studies, suffer from bad public relations and the misconception that all we do is practice grammar, punctuation, and citation styles, or that all we do is work on outdated material that is hard to relate to and irrelevant to people today. That's just not true."
Professor Ross wants his students to have the opportunity to critically analyze the work of a superstar phenomenon and transform it into a thoughtful, academic discussion. An enormous task, considering that in January he will be teaching about 200 students from different disciplines.
The three-hour class, which will take place once a week, will include a discussion of a featured album, a detailed song analysis, and a discussion of the visual rhetoric of some of her music videos.
Professor Ross tells Black Press Media that All Too Well is the song he would pick to best capture the essence of the course.
“There’s so much going on there in terms of poetic echoes, rhymes and references. We’re not gonna suffer for lack of things to talk about.”
