Taylor Swift psychology class at ASU joins worldwide course offerings

Thanks to a handful of universities and colleges around the world offering Taylor Swift coded courses, becoming an honorary Swiftie by way of study is easier now than ever before. 

Swifties can opt into these courses ranging from literature to social psychology at schools like Ghent University in Belgium, University of Texas at Austin, New York University, Stanford, or Arizona State University. All of these universities have offered or are currently offering a course focused on Swift’s lyrics, discography, as well as her potential impact. 

If you are interested in learning how the pop singer’s lyrics relate to themes present in social psychology, Arizona State has a course for you. 

The new course, named  Psychology of Taylor Swift – Advanced Topics of Social Psychology will be offered in the fall semester. 

Alexandra Wormley, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology will be teaching the course. 

Wormley told ASU News she feels using Swift as an entry point “will spark meaningful conversations and serve as a teaching tool for learning advanced psychology concepts.”

“The course is basically using Taylor Swift as a semester-long example of different phenomena — gossip, relationships, revenge,” Wormley said.

Here’s everything we know about the class.

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Taylor Swift merely a vehicle to explain social psych concepts

While the course’s appeal to Swifties should be obvious, Wormley stresses that “the class is not a seminar on how much we like or dislike her — we want to be able to learn about psychology.”

Wormley told ASU News she’s not presuming “any prior knowledge about Taylor Swift in my lectures” and is actually hoping some Taylor Swift haters — who we’ve learned are “gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” — do sign up to take the class, all the better to challenge the Swifties with other perspectives.