Harvard is using social media to search for new teaching assistants for its popular Taylor Swift course. The course is slated to begin in the Spring semester, and the instructor is looking for teaching assistants with experience.
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Harvard instructor Stephanie Burt says additional teaching help is needed to keep up with the demand for the course. According to a report from CBS, nearly 300 students signed up for the class. Burt has now reached out to academics on Twitter/X in her search for more instructors.
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Harvard Instructor Reaches Hundreds of Taylor Swift Academics on Social Media
“Our Taylor Swift course at Harvard is so popular that we need additional teaching assistants,” she wrote on January 3. “If you live in the Boston/Providence metro, love Tay, & have *qualifications or experience to teach a writing intensive college course,* my DMs are open.”
Speaking with WBZ-TV recently, per a report from NME, Burt explained she quickly became overwhelmed with messages. “I went from not having enough people who [were qualified] to having dozens, possibly 150, applications in just a few hours,” she said.
According to Harvard’s website, the course aims to explore “fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood, and appropriation.” Additionally, the course covers “how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.” Burt also explained more about the course to WBZ-TV and why she decided to teach a class on Taylor Swift.
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“The way she reaches to other parts of culture, she’s someone I feel good teaching a class about and someone who Harvard students already like and want to take classes about,” said Burt. We can, and even we should, through her work, make connections between what she does and other great artists who have used words in other art forms in the present and past.”
This isn’t the first class to be taught about Taylor Swift. Similar classes at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, UT Austin, and the NYU Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. The Berkeley course is titled “Artistry & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and looks at her business model as well as her cultural impact. The NYU course follows the evolution of her career in pop and country. Additionally, the UT Austin course focuses on her songwriting.
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