Yale University introduces class on Beyoncé’s political and cultural impact

Starting this upcoming spring semester, Yale will offer a class titled “Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music.” The aim, according to its course description, is to use her work as a lens through which to examine Black intellectual thought and activism.

It’s the latest college course to take on pop culture-inspired themes by focusing on a global music superstar, as universities around the world have embraced classes on the cultural impact of celebrities including Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

Following Beyoncé’s innovations and influence from her self-titled 2013 album to her latest, “Cowboy Carter,” students will analyze her albums, performance politics and concert films.

By looking at her midcareer repertoire, Yale’s new course will explore scholarly works and cultural texts across Black feminist theory, philosophy and anthropology, as well as art history, performance studies and musicology, the course description states.

The class will be taught by writer and Black studies scholar Daphne Brooks, who co-founded Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, a community of faculty and students working to “explore the untapped variety of black sound archives.”

Brooks said via email that the course has been in the works for years. Having previously taught a course titled “Black Women and Popular Music Culture” at Princeton University, Brooks said this will be her first opportunity to devote an entire lecture course to Beyoncé’s work.

“I’m looking forward to exploring her body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, Black feminist politics, Black liberation politics and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire,” Brooks wrote, “as well as the ways that her unprecedented experimentations with the album form, itself, have provided her with the platform to mobilize these themes.”

The course adds Yale to a string of universities that have created courses inspired by Beyoncé over the past decade or so.

Courses on the star’s political and cultural influence have popped up since the early 2010s, with Rutgers University’s “Politicizing Beyoncé” class and a “Beyonce: Critical Feminist Perspectives and U.S. Black Womanhood” course at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Cornell University has also offered versions of its “Beyoncé Nation” course, which studies her career trajectory as well as her impact on political activism and feminism. Other universities that have offered similar Beyoncé-themed courses include the University of Texas at San Antonio, California Polytechnic State University and Arizona State University.

And in the wake of Taylor Swift’s album rerecordings and “Eras Tour,” which shot her to even wider fame in recent years, multiple colleges — including Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the University of Florida — also began introducing courses tailored to the study of her lyricism and pop superstardom.