This fall, college-bound fans of pop star Taylor Swift will want to leave a "Blank Space" in their schedule. Students at the University of Texas at Austin will soon be able to take a literary course on the singer's extensive discography.
The course, Literary Contests and Contexts — The Taylor Swift Songbook, will be offered to undergraduate students in UT's Liberal Arts Honors program beginning this fall semester. The class will be taught by Professor Elizabeth Scala.
According to the UT English Department's Facebook post, the class will serve as an "introduction to literary studies and research methods" that uses the songwriting of Taylor Swift as a foundation.
"Let's turn that Easter Egg hunting and reading in detail to academic purposes!" the English Department wrote in the post.
"I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary, and then show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words," Scala told KXAN.
