(NewsNation) — As part of her Stanford University application process, Ava Jeffs wrote an essay about Taylor Swift’s song “Clean,” highlighting the theme of mental health. Now, she’s preparing to teach a course at the university centering around Swift’s discography.
“I thought it’d be fun to try to curate an actual academic course around the subject, because I really appreciate songwriting as an art form, and I wanted it to be taken seriously,” Jeffs told NewsNation.
The 10-week course, “The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling With Taylor Swift Through the Eras,” will be offered to students in the spring, joining a roster of other Swift courses at colleges across the nation.
Jeffs, now a sophomore computer science student, said she started curating the idea for the course during the fall semester of her freshman year. However, getting the course approved was “a long and interesting process.”
“I kind of developed the idea for it in my fall semester, and then kind of just started creating a syllabus,” she recalled. “It was really fun to go through all the music and the discography and kind of tried to craft a class around it.”
Ultimately, Jeffs reached out to several professors in the university’s English department, and one liked her syllabus and helped sponsored the course.
Overall, Jeffs hopes students take away “the narrative power of music” from the course.
“I think that for many years in higher education, we studied, you know, works of poetry and works of classic literature from hundreds of years ago, and a lot of the times these stories, or these poems are exploring very similar themes to Taylor Swift songs or other songs in popular music,” Jeffs said. “I hope that students can take away looking at albums and songs as kind of storybooks and really appreciate songwriters for the art that they produce,” she said.
Registration hasn’t opened for the class yet; however, Jeffs said several students have already emailed her and are interested in the course.
Jeffs said the course has received some pushback, but she wants to clarify that she’s not suggesting students should pursue a major in “Taylor Swift Studies” but Swift’s artistry should be taken “seriously as other art forms are in higher academia.”
“This is not a course that people are required to take at Stanford,” Jeffs said. “This is something that I want to bring to the university, because Stanford accepted me, not only to take away from all the great things that are offered our institution but also add to it and filling gaps where I see fit.”