- A professor in Belgium is kicking off a course this fall titled "Literature: Taylor's Version."
- Elly McCausland plans to use Swift's work as a reference point to study other works of literature.
This writer has long thought of Taylor Swift as a great American poet in her own right, but it seems like a literature professor in Belgium shares those sentiments.
Elly McCausland, an assistant professor at Belgium's Ghent University, is kicking off a course this fall titled "Literature: Taylor's Version," and it's truly the stuff of any college-aged Swift fan's wildest dreams.
McCausland — a self-professed Swiftie, told The Guardian she plans to use the course as a jumping-off point, to compare how the ideas and core themes in Swift's pop songs can also be found in everything from Sylvia Plath to Shakespeare.
"I've never had so many emails from excited students asking if they can take the course," McCausland told The Guardian. She added that "non-students" have also reached out to her to see if they can participate in the course.
"There will be critics who think it's sort of frivolous and silly," she added. "The primary focus is literature, but also I want us to think critically about Swift."
It probably isn't too hard to imagine someone quoting "Look What You Made Me Do" or "Anti-Hero" in an SAT essay about the fall of the tragic heroine or penning a graduate thesis comparing and contrasting the use of color motifs in "Maroon" and "Red." So I'm just glad at least one professor's staying ahead of the curve, and getting Swifties excited about hitting the books.