Last July, I purchased a copy of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). This was nothing new. I’ve bought every Taylor Swift album on its release day since Debut.

This time, I hit play, pulled out a notebook, and began making notes of feminist thinkers and writing studies scholars who might help me explain the impact of swapping out a line about mattresses for one about matches.

I am living out what would have been the dream job of teenage me if I had dared to imagine it: I research and write about Taylor Swift for a living.

The Emergence of “Swiftie Studies”

In fall of 2021, I returned to school, pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition. As I studied the history of the discipline and the research methods of my field, I kept thinking about Taylor Swift. Admittedly, some of this is owed to the fact that her ever-expanding discography has been playing on a loop in some corner of my brain non-stop since 2006. But it’s also because the more I thought about language and culture and the movement of ideas, the more depth I saw in Swift’s lyrics, personas, and career moves.

Setting out to write an analysis of Swift’s evolving feminist rhetorics through her re-recordings, I asked Rachel, my professor and mentor, “Is this too crazy? Will anyone take this seriously?”

Her advice: “Do serious work, and it will find an audience.”

Oh, would it ever.

What we couldn’t have predicted at the time was that some combination of Taylor’s re-records, Midnights, and The Eras Tour would catapult Swift to new heights, taking us to 2023: officially the Year of Taylor Swift. Time named her Person of the Year. USA Today hired a reporter just to cover Swiftie stories. And academia turned its attention to Taylor Swift with notable intensity.

Classes focused on Taylor Swift appear in course catalogs at places like NYU, Harvard, and Stanford. Writers, psychologists, economists, musicians, philosophers, archaeologists, and others have gathered together at special interdisciplinary, international conferences to share research related to Taylor. Many more began writing: books on Taylor Swift’s connection to literature, philosophy, and other subjects; opinion pieces on Taylor’s economic impact, feminist models, and political clout; and other pieces of media that interrogate Swift from just about every conceivable academic angle.

Glitter & Rigor

I have been lucky enough to take part in these conversations specifically at Taylor Swift-centric academic conferences like Indiana University’s The Conference Era or The Swiftposium which are, in many ways, typical academic events: scholars talk about a range of theories, methods, and applications. But, in other ways, these Taylor Swift events carry a different energy. Cardigans replace blazers. Snacks are eras-themed. We walk into these spaces already sharing inside jokes and a sense of community. There’s glitter on the floor after the party.

Thanks to opportunities like these, Taylor Swift remains an object of study, a muse, a soundtrack to my graduate school work. When emailing my advisor, Jackie, about my reading list for comprehensive exams, I sent over the “incredible, exhilarating, extraordinary times” gif. She responded with a string of celebratory emojis. A friend asked me, “Is this how all PhD students talk to their committee chairs? That’s not how I imagined it.”

Taylor Swift isn’t what most of us imagine when we think of academic study. But why is that? Because she isn’t “serious”? Why not–does “serious” have to mean “stodgy”? Surely, we can take seriously one of the biggest cultural forces of our day, even when it takes the form of a sparkling pop star. Glitter doesn’t preclude rigor.

I teach a Taylor Swift-themed writing class. We make friendship bracelets, compare versions of “All Too Well,” and theorize about when and how Taylor will drop reputation (Taylor’s Version). But, primarily, we take those actions themselves as objects of analysis, interrogating them as artifacts of multimodal composing practices within specific rhetorical situations.

Turns out, it’s a short walk from discussing the clues Taylor left ahead of the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) announcement to discussing conspiratorial thinking, groupthink, evidence analysis, and the ways (mis)information spreads online. While writing about Taylor, my students have also written about capitalism, gender, race, environmental issues, and the ways they see their own lives, emotions, and language as entangled in those critical topics.

Kairos: Speak Now (Aristotle’s Version)

In my academic discipline, Rhetoric, we talk a lot about kairos. Aristotle connected kairos to timeliness–delivering the right message at the right time, seizing the opportune moment. In other words, “I don’t think you should wait. I think you should speak now.”

Talking about Taylor Swift is a kairotic opportunity for many academics and academic institutions. It’s easy to take the cynical view and see Taylor Swift academic content as a mere marketing gimmick. But I believe it’s more than that. Real rigorous work can be conducted with Swift as subject. But it’s also more than that. Seriously studying Taylor Swift provides space for us to ask existential questions about academia itself: where does knowledge come from? Who has access to it? Whose ideas and identities are considered valid?

Ideas can and should have relevance to the world we live in. If we don’t use our expertise, if we’re “too serious” to apply it to the conversations of our day, that knowledge will be lost. Even worse, our knowledge may never evolve. If we fail to let our expertise matter, we fail to take our insights seriously at all. We need to hear each other out, and they said “speak now.”