Interview with Theresa Iker on her new course, "Taylor Swift and Millennial America"
Theresa Iker specializes in modern American politics, gender, and culture. She received her Ph.D. in History, with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), from Stanford University in 2023, where she now serves as a School of Humanities and Sciences lecturer in the COLLEGE program and Department of History.
How (and why) have you decided to teach a course on Taylor Swift?
In my research and in my teaching, I gravitate toward subjects at the intersection of gender, culture, and politics. Taylor Swift’s superstardom is one such subject. She is a female singer-songwriter who has consistently and unapologetically centered themes of girlhood and womanhood in her work, even when she has been criticized for it. While many of her earliest and most loyal fans are millennial women who describe feeling as though they have grown up alongside her, her enormous fanbase is now nearly evenly split among men and women—and over half of American adults identify as her fans. Finally, you might recall recently seeing bizarre conspiracy theories about Swift’s role in a covert government plot to keep Biden in power. One in five Americans believe in this plot, the vast majority of whom also think that the 2020 election was stolen.
I found myself drawn to these stark differences of opinion (Is she a musical genius or a self-absorbed diarist? an artist of the particular or the universal? a beloved or a reviled celebrity?). Once I started thinking, I couldn’t stop. The result is this class: it will place Swift’s artistry and career in historical context, with the ultimate goal of seeing the cultural tastes and political divisions of the modern United States from a new perspective.
What is specific about this particular U.S. historical moment that makes Taylor Swift, as you state in your course description, “a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse”?
The simple answer as to why Taylor Swift is so visible now is because she is in the midst of her global Eras tour, which has generated over two billion dollars in North American ticket sales alone. But the real answer, as historians know, is always more complicated. A central course theme will be the duality of exploring the world that made Taylor Swift, while also coming to understand the ways in which Swift is remaking the world around her. The course begins in 1989, Swift’s birth year, the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of the Cold War and a period of stability and optimism in the United States. It was also a moment of “Girl Power” feminism that encouraged female self-expression and artistry, particularly in growing digital spaces. Swift benefitted from this constellation of events, as well as her parents’ wealth and support of her career.
Our course will trace these and other historical forces into the early 2000s, when we will also start to examine how Swift has wielded her growing wealth and influence. Her songwriting and performance style powerfully countered the hypersexualized female pop music landscape (think the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera), influencing a range of current artists from Phoebe Bridgers to Olivia Rodrigo. She has also reshaped industry norms, having taken on Apple’s music streaming service to ensure fair pay for artists and, most famously, reclaimed ownership of her music by re-recording her masters. Her political voice, as mentioned above, has registered as a serious threat to the Right. Only by examining this combination of forces, trends, and decisions can we begin to understand Swift’s current power.
How does this compare to her reception globally?
Swift has an enormous global following. International demand for her live performances has meant that her last two tours have been stadium-only, and her current Eras tour is making its way through South America, Australia, Asia, and Europe this year. One interesting distinction between Swift’s American reception versus how she is perceived in other countries is that heads of state worldwide and across the political spectrum tend to express their enthusiasm for her. Leaders in countries from Canada to China to Hungary have publicly appealed (in tweets and letters laden with her song lyrics) to Swift to make stops in their stadiums on her current tour. They are undoubtedly seeking what economists have called the “TSwift Lift” to local spending on food, hotels, and transportation. While this course is limited to exploring Swift’s rise and influence in the United States, a class taking a more global approach would be fascinating.
How does it feel to design a course engaging with a living, breathing subject? What sort of materials will the students be looking at?
Because my own research examines the recent past and describes living subjects, I felt somewhat prepared to design this course. However, as any Swiftie can tell you, the amount of information and speculation that exists about Swift is truly endless, a phenomenon we can partially attribute to the fact that she is a digital native who has expertly navigated social media throughout her career. I am hoping to make this a strength rather than a weakness of the course, assigning a range of primary sources that include tweets, album liner notes, music videos, and press interviews alongside more traditional historical materials.
In addition to engaging with and critiquing her work, what would the students do? Would they do a course project?
Our assignments are meant to reinforce the overarching goal of placing Swift in historical context, and in turn better understanding recent American history through Swift. Each week, students will take turns presenting on one of our assigned Swift songs from the time period studied, connecting its lyrics and critical reception to our readings. For instance, in our week on third-wave feminist history and the many feminist responses to her work, some of which are quite critical, our assigned song “The Man” includes the lyric “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can / wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was the man.” Some have taken this to be a feminist anthem, while others consider it the epitome of white liberal feminism. Additionally, students have a choice of writing a final research paper or a historically informed op-ed on any assigned week of material.
What are some challenges or difficulties you have run into?
A challenge I have faced in syllabus development has been the difficulty of finding recent historical sources on some aspects of 2000s culture and politics. To navigate these issues, our secondary sources will draw from a range of disciplines alongside history, including American Studies, English and literature, and musicology. We will also immerse ourselves in what other historians have had to say about working in the recent past, including Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano’s excellent Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back. I also welcome any suggestions from colleagues!
Are you yourself a "Swiftie"? Why or why not?
A topic to be discussed in class is the definition of “a Swiftie”—is it a fan of Swift’s music first and foremost, or does it require a deeper (and some would say parasocial) identification with her personality? I self-identify as a critically engaged Swiftie, one who both loves Swift’s music and tries to take a full view of her profound influence, which can include harm. (A major issue in the Swift discourse right now, for instance, is her private jet usage, its environmental impact, and her threat to sue a student who tracks celebrity jet emissions.)
The class is open to all, including those who are neutral or actively against Swift as an artist or public figure. I aim to encourage all students, especially those who are diehard Swifties, to maintain a critical distance and a fundamental recognition that Swift is above all, human. This is a skill, of course, that will serve them well in any future historical pursuit: we study humanity and all of its brilliance, contradiction, and messiness.