Students expecting a ‘fight to the death’ to get a spot in Stanford’s new Taylor Swift class

Stanford student Ava Jeffs is in her professor era.

The rising sophomore and lifelong “Swiftie” — a term used to describe fans of pop music icon Taylor Swift — is creating the curriculum for a new English class that examines the singer’s songwriting over the course of her career. Swift is in the middle of a record-setting global tour, dubbed “The Eras Tour,” which takes fans through a more than three-hour journey through her 10 albums.

Her latest, “Midnights” — which dropped last October and broke Spotify’s record for the most album streams in a single day — was billed by Swift as “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”

“The whole goal of the class is to dive into the art of songwriting, exploring the interplay between literary references and lyricism and storytelling in Taylor Swift’s entire discography, taking it one album at a time and trying to look at the evolution of using songwriting as a narrative form,” Jeffs said. “It will draw parallels to classic works of literature and poetry in each album and gain a deeper understanding of the narrative power of music.”

The class is titled “The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling with Taylor Swift through the Eras,” and is a play on Swift’s song “The Last Great American Dynasty” from her eighth studio album, “Folklore.” It’s the second Swift class at Stanford after “All Too Well (Ten Week Version)” was taught earlier this year and gave students a chance to analyze the 10-minute version of the song with the same name.

Jeffs, a computer science major, said the inspiration for the course came from her love of Swift and music in general. Growing up, she remembers her mom driving her to Target to purchase the singer-songwriter’s latest albums.

“When I listen to music, I’m a really big lyrics person, so I love to dive deep into the meaning,” she said.

Her Stanford application essay also was based on the song “Clean” from the album “1989” — a track she described as “healing” for her when she was battling an eating disorder.

To get the course approved, Jeffs created her own syllabus and reached out to nearly every professor in the English department until Professor Mark McGurl agreed to serve as a sponsor. Jeffs will handle the curriculum and teaching, while McGurl will ensure the academic integrity of the class and its grading.

Stanford spokesperson Luisa Rapport said in an email that the class is part of the university’s Student Initiated Course program.

“There are a handful of Student Initiated Courses offered per quarter,” Rapport said. “Student Initiated Courses are considered ‘activity courses,’ and allow students to explore areas of interest or enrichment.”

These types of classes are graded as “satisfactory” or “non-satisfactory” and do not count toward students’ GPAs.

Oriana Riley, a rising junior at Stanford who has been a fan of Swift’s since the singer’s 2012 album “Red,” said she expects a “fight to the death” during enrollment. She’s hoping to take the course if she can get in.

“I think she’s just a fabulous storyteller to model storytelling off of,” Riley said of Swift. “She’s consistently produced really good original music year after year. I also think she’s a really good role model for teenage girls and college-age girls, as well.”

Stanford isn’t the first university to offer Swift-centric classes in recent years. Similar courses have popped up at the University of Texas, NYU and the Berklee College of Music.

Robert Thompson, the director at Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, said pop culture classes have been emerging at colleges since the 1980s. At that time, classes on Madonna were a student favorite — and often controversial.

“If a university’s mission is to try to figure out things about the human condition, yes, it’s important that we study wars and presidents. But I think it’s also important that we study lawn ornaments and sitcoms and love songs and those kinds of things,” Thompson said.

While Jeffs is still working out the details of the course, she hopes to focus some on Swift’s ability to create entire worlds based on cities, time periods, seasons and color schemes in her different albums. She also wants to highlight Swift’s celebration of girlhood — especially since she said a lot of classic literature has lacked an accurate representation of what coming of age looks like for young women.

On her TikTok page, Jeffs has begun revealing some of her ideas for the course. In a video posted on Tuesday, she teased a week-by-week breakdown, with week two focusing on Swift’s second album, “Fearless,” which Jeffs called “the romantic idealism era.” Week five will focus on “1989,” named for the year Swift was born, in what she has identified as the “new city, new sound era.” It was also the singer’s debut in pop music and was inspired by her move to New York City and the synth-pop sounds of the 1980s.

Swift returns to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara this month, playing shows on July 28 and 29.