What’s ‘A Swift History?’ An Ontario professor shares what students will learn in a Taylor Swift history course

A weeks-long history course about Taylor Swift filled up in just a matter of minutes, making a record for the Ontario university similar to how the musician herself breaks records for her stadium shows.

“Its filled up in 19 minutes. It was a record,” Elizabeth Vlossack, historian-turned-Swiftie at Brock University, told CTV News Toronto.

The associate professor of history explained she started to recognize Swift as more than just a popstar a couple of years ago after listening to “folklore”—an album where Swift deviates from singing solely about her life to delving into the lives of others.

“It’s also the album where she engages with historical figures and with the past,” Vlossack said.

“That’s really where I started to think, okay, she’s not just invoking the past or writing songs about historical figures or using historical events as allusions to illustrate what she’s trying to convey in her music and her storytelling, but she’s also engaging in historical research and thinking about the past and thinking historically.”

That particular album features “the last great American dynasty,” a song about Rebekah West Harkness, a “misfit widow getting gleeful revenge on the town that cast her out,” as Swift previously said. It also features “epiphany,” a song about Swift’s grandfather’s role in the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Second World War.

“A Swift History” will be in session this May at the St. Catharines university. For five weeks, about 40 students will dissect the singer’s historical allusions in her work, learn about those exact references, but also think about how history is pieced together.

Vlossack says students will learn about both world wars, the 1920s, the 1950s and the post-war era, and the LGBTQ2S+ movement in the 1960s, where they will tie those historical events to Swift’s growing awareness as a modern-day historical figure.

“The course kind of does all sorts of different things,” Vlossack said. “It’s a course that’s teaching students about historical methods and writing history and thinking about what history actually is as a discipline, which is notoriously difficult to teach.”

Vlossack pointed to Swift’s interest in primary sources, much like a historian, in that she pieces stories through different mediums like old photographs or objects. In the song “marjorie,” Swift writes about the artifacts of her grandmother’s life, like grocery store receipts.

“Thinking about how we piece together stories of the past through these different types of sources, and some of the challenges that come with using these types of sources but also things like interpretation and whose voice are we prioritizing when we’re telling a particular story or writing a particular history,” Vlossack said.

“Can we tell the story from a different angle and what does that do to our overall understanding of a historical event, and so this is something that Taylor Swift does in her music.”

The class is open to everyone—no matter what their discipline is—and whether they are a full-fledged Swiftie or not, Vlossack hopes students will leave the course having a deeper appreciation for history’s dynamism and be inspired to take more history courses. No matter what a person’s interest is, from sports to film, Vlossack says there is a way to view it through a historical lens.

“My priority, really, is for students to gain that understanding of what history is,” Vlossack said. “It’s not sort of this stuffy, old kind of subject.”

While the course is being offered for the first time this spring, Vlossack hopes to teach it again next year.