Shake off those prejudices about studying Taylor Swift

Academic studies on the merits of the star’s lyrics are not the Mickey Mouse courses you might think, says Dr Clio Doyle

- Dr Clio Doyle

On the day before the Liverpool leg of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, more than a hundred people will attend "Tay Day", a now sold-out academic symposium on her work. Academic conferences and symposia on Taylor Swift are – to quote a song title from Red (Taylor’s Version) – nothing new; they are now being offered worldwide, from the United States to Australia.

In fact, only last week I was just one of many academics asked to present at a conference on Swift and feminism organised by Dr Claire Hurley at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus. Like many people studying Swift, I came to this field through a somewhat circuitous route. I have a PhD in English and Renaissance studies from Yale and currently work as a lecturer in early modern literature at Queen Mary University of London.

But in 2021, I started a podcast that used critical theory and has now grown into the book I am working on, Dear Reader: Taylor Swift and the Idea of English Literature in which I argue for the serious literary study of Swift.

The way fans read and discuss her work is often very similar to how we ask students to engage with the texts we teach in literature classrooms. Fans track Swift’s references to older literature such as the poetry of William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, analyse the way she self-consciously positions herself as an author, and closely read her work to find in it a dense network of allusions, revisions, and slowly changing metaphors.

These discussions often lead to classic questions of literary theory: whether there is an essential “canon” of literature; is there such a thing as literary value, and to what extent our knowledge of an author’s biography should influence the reading of their work.