The wedding between your English teacher and your gym teacher may actually be studied in an Ivy League college class.
Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University in Massachusetts, has previously gone viral for her popular 200-person lecture class in which students analyzed Taylor Swift’s songwriting and art. With Swift’s recent wedding marking a major milestone in the musician’s life, Burt shares with TODAY.com some thoughts on the elements from the big day that will likely make it into some future lessons.
“How and how often it comes up is going to depend on whether she writes a bunch of songs about it,” Burt says of incorporating the topic of Swift’s July 3 wedding at Madison Square Garden into her teachings. “Of course, there are weddings all over her music, and we’ll talk about her wedding in the context of the weddings envisioned in her music.”
Burt — a Swiftie, poet and author — is not currently slated to teach a Swift-themed class in the upcoming fall semester, she says. However, she plans to do so after the multi-platinum artist drops her next record, which will mark the musician’s 13th studio album.
Burt suspects the new music will contain plenty of references to the nuptials, which were attended by an estimated 1,100 people, a source told NBC News. And that, she says, would be fodder for analysis.
In addition to the potential new wedding references, Burt says she plans to have students examine songs that touch on matrimony — through both happiness and heartbreak — including 2008 hit single “Love Story,” the 2019 song “Paper Rings” off of the album “Lover” and ballad “champagne problems” off of 2020 album “evermore.” There’s also the 2024 track “But Daddy I Love Him” and other references to settling down on Swift’s most recent studio album “Life of a Showgirl,” Burt says.
While the star-studded event itself has been fascinating for fans to watch from afar, Burt says that ultimately, students wouldn’t be focusing on the musician’s personal life. Rather, it’s all about the work that springs from it, Burt says.
“We’ll see how and whether she makes the wedding into art,” Burt says. “The life of an artist — if the art works well enough — is always less interesting than the art.”
Burt last taught her Swift-themed English class in 2024. Much like other college classes, the course involved a healthy dose of reading in addition to, of course, music listening. Students looked into the texts of renowned writers like Willa Cather and James Weldon Johnson, taking in “literary works important to (Swift) and works about song and performance,” the syllabus said.
“We will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts,” the syllabus says. “We will learn how to think about illicit affairs, and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure.”
One of the coolest aspects of that class? No final exam.
Burt explains to TODAY.com that Swift has several qualities that make her a standout artist — one of which is the musician’s ability to evolve.
“She has really shown an ability to work with people and to discover new parts of herself with new creative partners,” Burt says. “That’s been an important part of her longevity and an important part of her growing up as a person, as an artist.”
Most importantly, Burt says, Swift has mastered the art of being both aspirational and relatable.
“She writes song after song where you can see yourself in the song, you can have that feeling, ‘Oh, she’s talking about me! She’s talking to me!’ And the feeling, ‘I wish I could be more like this. I wish I could live that life,’” Burt says.