college essays about taylor swift

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I Taught the Taylor Swift Class at Harvard. Here’s My Thesis

L ast fall I told Harvard’s English Department that I planned to offer a class this spring on Taylor Swift . No one objected; Harvard professors like me get lots of latitude in confecting electives as long as we also offer the bread-and-butter material our majors need. (Most of my work is poetry-related; I also teach our regular undergrad course about literary form, from Beowulf on.) I’d call my new class Taylor Swift and Her World , as in: We’d read and listen to other artists and authors (part of her world). But also as in: It’s her world; we just live in it.

I’ve been living in it ever since. I thought I’d be teaching a quiet seminar: 20-odd Swifties around a big oak table, examining and appreciating her career, from her debut to Midnights , alongside her influences, from Carole King (see her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame speech) to William Wordsworth (see “The Lakes” from Folklore ). We would track her echoes and half rhymes, her arrangements and collaborations and allusions, her hooks and her choruses. We might sing along. We’d learn why “You Belong With Me” relies so much on its with ( you don’t belong to me, nor I to you ). We’d learn how the unease in “Tolerate It” speaks to its time signature (5/4). Maybe some English majors would get into songwriting. Maybe some Swifties would leave with old poems in their heads.

To be fair, almost all those things have now happened. We did sing along. Some undergrads learned to love the 18th-century poet and satirist Alexander Pope, or at least to pretend they did: Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” depicts his exasperation with superfans, false friends, and haters in ways rarely equaled until Reputation. We cracked open Easter eggs, and we studied her rhythms. But we couldn’t fit around a table. At one point 300 students signed up for the class; almost 200 ended up taking it. We met in a concert hall on campus, with a grand piano at center stage. I gave what I hope were engaging lectures, with pauses for questions, and stage props: a melodica, or a cuddly stuffed snake (for the snake motifs on Reputation ). We had theater lights, and balcony seats, and the kind of big screen few humanities classrooms now need.

Harvard English Professor Stephanie Burt teaches the course “Taylor Swift and Her World.”

And we had eyes on us from outside the room. One user on Twitter (now officially X) “leaked” our syllabus as if we had kept a Hollywood secret. Students put clips (with our okay) on TikTok. And we had reporters—daily, for weeks—asking to visit. We ended up inviting the Today show, whose camera-ready journalist Emilie Ikeda listened admirably to our undergrads. My teaching assistants, our students, and I spoke with the BBC. And with TMZ. And with Australian public radio. And with broadcast TV news in Boston, and Boise, and Sacramento, and NPR and RTE (Irish public broadcasting), and with journalists from Brazil, Chile, the People’s Republic of China, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and Sweden.

We learned, in other words, that Swift attracts attention: That attention amplifies things about her, even without her. Teaching the class sometimes felt like one more of Swift’s vaunted collaborations, another multimedia performance involving reporters, and students, and her. Journalists asked if Swift would visit. (She’d be welcome, but she’s got a lot going on.) They asked what I wanted students to learn. (How to think about works of art.) And they asked if Harvard resisted a course on a celebrity. (We read dead people too, like Pope and James Weldon Johnson and Willa Cather. Who were, in their own time, celebrities.)

If I had—and have—a thesis about Swift’s work as a whole, here it is: She’s excelled as a songwriter and as a performer by staying both aspirational and relatable. Swifties and casual fans see parts of ourselves in her, but we also see someone we wish we could be. Her first few albums made the pairing clear: Songs like “Fifteen” and “You Belong With Me” spoke to common high school crushes and heartbreaks. At the same time, they let listeners look up to her. Not only did she put into words what so many fans felt but could not express so crisply, she seemed lucky, even enviable, while doing it. She sang about senior boys who might stop you in hallways, “wink at you and say, ‘You know, I haven’t seen you around before,’ ” not about bullies who might shove you in bins; she wrote about feeling excluded by classmates, but also about her attentive, affectionate mother, who took her to “drive until we found a town far enough away / And we talk and window shop till I’ve forgotten all their names.” No wonder so many people—especially girls her age and younger—saw in her both a peer and an ideal.

When our class entered her pop era, her post-teenage stardom from 1989 on, my thesis hit a snag. We saw how the woman who clearly enjoyed the lights, who sang “we never go out of style” and dated Harry Styles, remained aspirational. But what made these versions of Swift relatable? One answer: Like any great writer in any medium, she has a talent for framing common emotions, for crystallizing nostalgia, lust, and regret. If we’ve felt them, she lets us feel them anew.

Another answer, though, arose on the classroom’s wood floor, or perhaps at its grand piano. Swift sings about life onstage, about her wish and even need to sparkle, bejeweled, whether or not she likes her dating life. Even when she tries to find some privacy, she can’t stop thinking that other people are watching, “drama queens taking swings” (“Call It What You Want”). Some nights she feels like a giant, or a monster, as she put it in “Anti-Hero.” She can look at the crowd but never in the mirror and knows she has to perform. She knows she needs us even more than we need her, even when she gets “tired of being known” (“Dorothea”): She’ll do many things not to feel alone. She can even do it with a broken heart.

So could we, I realized. So could I. At a college famous for being famous, in front of what—for most humanities teachers—counts as a crowd, I could layer my own need for approval, my wish that students would choose me (or my favorite writers), and my own impostor syndrome over Swift’s, and see that my dreams weren’t rare. I saw myself, not in her talents but in her anxieties, one more child for whom, as she put it lately, “growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all.” Some of our students, I think, could sympathize too, in the pressure chambers and dens of precocity that make up Harvard: They too might think—as songs like “Nothing New,” like “Castles Crumbling,” like “ Clara Bow ” imply—that no kudos would suffice, no A+ would be enough.

Fortunately I did not have to feel that way—much less to study Swift—on my own. Though I devised the syllabus with help from head teaching assistant MJ Cunniff, the teaching itself was a team affair: myself and MJ and nine discussion section leaders, from Harvard’s Music and American Studies departments and Harvard Law School and from Northeastern and Tufts and Brown universities. MJ gave a lecture that tied Swift to Sylvia Plath, prompting a passel of essays about her verse. Other discussion leaders explicated chord changes on guitar; explained the dialectology in “country” and “pop” voices; and unpacked the Swift–Kanye–Kim Kardashian spat, with videos.

As Swift does on her songs, we brought in guest stars too. The critic and songwriter Franklin Bruno explained why pop songs often (and folk songs almost never) have bridges. Bryan West, USA Today ’s Swift beat reporter, flew to Boston to meet us. Dani and Olivia from the great fan podcast Taylearning conducted a survey for students, then visited us in person to break down the data. Fashion historian Chloe Chapin analyzed Swift’s outfits; law school prof Rebecca Tushnet demystified copyright.

Ours was hardly this year’s sole college class on Swift: If I teach it again—and I hope I can—I’ll compare notes first with professors of English, communication, economics, music, and more, from Ghent University in Belgium, the University of Texas at Austin, TCU, Westfield State, and the University of Kansas. I’ll also learn from the mixed reviews students gave me: A few dozen (to quote Swift’s “Cardigan”) said I was their favorite and they would gladly come back to (more courses with) me. A few dozen more students found me hard to follow (I could have used, should have used, bullet points on slides). In our final week we asked students to tell us—anonymously—their favorite and least favorite aspects of class. What did they consider the course’s best parts? Our out-of-town guests, and teaching assistants’ guest lectures. Apparently Taylor Swift and Her World reached its new heights when I sat down, shut up, and just listened. Like all classes, it didn’t belong to me; it belonged with the students who chose to be there. The artist who wrote “Long Live” for her band, who encouraged fans to make friendship bracelets, who knows how we need one another, might have approved.

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Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society Essay

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Introduction

Reference list.

Taylor Swift is one of today’s most well-known and influential people. As a singer-songwriter, fashion icon, and philanthropist, she has amassed millions of fans worldwide. This essay examines Taylor Swift’s depiction in the media and society and how her image has influenced how people see her. Taylor Swift is depicted in the media and everyday life as a personable, down-to-earth individual who connects with a diverse range of individuals (Aguirre, 2019). Her prominence bolsters this portrayal as a fashion icon and socially concerned advocate, which positions her as an inspiration to her fans.

Taylor Swift is typically regarded as a personable and genuine person who connects with many admirers, both young and elderly. She is well-known for her narrative songs, many of which are inspired by her own experiences and relationships (Jensen, 2019). Hence, she has earned a reputation as a musician who can connect and engage with her audience on a human level. For example, Taylor Swift’s image in the media includes her standing as a fashion star. Swift is well-known for her particular style, which combines old and new elements. She has worked with several fashion firms, including Louis Vuitton and Stella McCartney, and has appeared in several fashion magazines (BillboardStyle, 2022). This fashion icon portrayal has helped to cement her status as a likable personality who is not afraid to experiment with her appearance.

Taylor Swift’s advocacy and kindness are other examples of how she is regarded in society. Swift has been vocal about various social and political issues, including LGBTQ rights and education. She has also been involved in several charitable activities, such as attempts to alleviate hunger and assist disaster victims (Rice, 2020). This portrayal of her as a socially conscious and committed celebrity has contributed to her standing as an inspiration and role model for her fans.

In conclusion, in the media and society, Taylor Swift is portrayed as an approachable, genuine person who connects with various people. Her status as a fashion icon and socially conscious activist solidifies this portrayal and positions her as an inspiration to her followers. Taylor Swift has received recognition not only for her status as a socially conscious campaigner and fashion icon but also for her philanthropic activities and support of numerous non-profit organizations. Her dedication to using her position to improve the world has bolstered her reputation as a role model and an inspiration to her supporters.

Aguirre, A. (2019) ‘ Taylor Swift on sexism, scrutiny, and standing up for herself ‘, Vogue , Web.

BillboardStyle, B. (2022) ‘ Taylor Swift’s style evolution, from 2006 to now ‘, Billboard, Web.

Jensen, E. (2019) ‘ Dwayne Johnson, Taylor Swift, Gayle King, more cover time’s 100 most influential people issue ‘, USA Today: Time magazine. Gannett Satellite Information Network. Web.

Larocca, C. (2019) ‘ Taylor Swift is the artist of the Decade ‘ , Insider, Web.

Rice, N. (2020) ‘ Taylor Swift promises to ‘always advocate’ for rights of the LGBTQ community: I’m ‘grateful for this ‘, People, Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 6). Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/taylor-swifts-depiction-in-genre-culture-and-society/

"Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society." IvyPanda , 6 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/taylor-swifts-depiction-in-genre-culture-and-society/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society'. 6 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/taylor-swifts-depiction-in-genre-culture-and-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/taylor-swifts-depiction-in-genre-culture-and-society/.

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IvyPanda . "Taylor Swift’s Depiction in Genre, Culture, and Society." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/taylor-swifts-depiction-in-genre-culture-and-society/.

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Taylor swift, the wordsworth of our time.

Harvard English Professor Stephanie Burt teaches “Taylor Swift and Her World.”

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Eileen O’Grady

Harvard Staff Writer

New English course studies pop star’s lyrics alongside classic literature

It turns out Taylor Swift could keep company with the Romantic-era poets.

On a recent Monday afternoon, Professor Stephanie Burt asked some 200 students — packed into Lowell Lecture Hall for the popular new English course “Taylor Swift and Her World” — to consider their role as listeners to “Fifteen,” the second track off the superstar’s second album, “Fearless.” 

In the song, Swift presents herself as a teenage girl who’s both relatable and aspirational with lyrics that reflect upon high school, friendship, and dating. Burt compared the song’s reflective qualities to William Wordsworth’s 1798  poem  “Tintern Abbey.” 

“She’s establishing herself as a kind of ally for us, what the poet and literary theorist  Allen Grossman  calls a ‘hermeneutic friend,’” said  Burt , the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor in the Department of English. Or in other words, “the literary or musical text that you’re getting into is going to help you out, it simultaneously knows more than you do, and knows what’s going on with you.”

The course resonates with the many students who have been fans since childhood. Seated in tiered rows on the main floor and in the balcony, they nodded along intently with the lecture, occasionally laughing when Burt threw out an insider Swiftie reference. 

It’s the largest class Burt has ever taught — and the largest taught in the arts and humanities this spring. The professor, who has long wanted to create a course centering the works of a songwriter, knew “all too well” that it was time to examine Swift’s writing through an academic lens.

“She’s one of the great songwriters of our time,” Burt said. “If she weren’t, she wouldn’t be this popular. And I love the idea that we’re going to spend this much time with her music.”

The syllabus is organized around the “eras” of Swift’s career, starting with her 2006 debut album and progressing to her most recent. Students examine themes of fan and celebrity culture, whiteness, adolescence, and adulthood alongside songs by Dolly Parton, Carole King, Beyoncé, and Selena, and writing by Willa Cather, Alexander Pope, Sylvia Plath, and James Weldon Johnson. 

“The best way to get someone into something is to connect it to something they already love,” Burt said, in an interview before class. “I do think there’s going to be a lot more Harvard students reading Alexander Pope because he’s in the Taylor Swift course than if he only showed up in courses that were entirely dead people.”

Burt explained that she is teaching Swift as a songwriter rather than a poet because writing for music is its own literary form, one that requires different skills than writing for the page. Burt and teaching fellow Matthew Jordan regularly unpack songs on the piano during class. During a recent class, the whole room broke out into spontaneous song as Jordan performed “Love Story.”

“Usually, poetry means works of art that use nothing but words that are created to be read on a page that do not have to be read aloud by the author,” Burt said. “Songwriters are writing for a melody; they are writing for singing interpreters. You are not getting all that you can out of a song if you are reading it on a page.”

‘Tortured poets’ department?

What common themes do you see in these excerpts from William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen”? Listen to the professor’s take below.

Transcript:

STEPHANIE BURT:  She [Taylor Swift] is far from the first or the only writer who has written looking back at her younger self and addressing someone else — a friend, a specified reader, an audience — as a younger version of themselves. “I’m going to tell you what I wish someone had told me when I was that age, because I look at you — listener, reader, sister named Dorothy — and I see myself when I was that age, and by the way, I’m really close to that age. I’ve only grown up a little. I’m going to show you how that works.” That is a central trope of the literary movement which generates “tortured poets,” which we call Romanticism.”

Cormac Savage ’25, a concentrator in Romance languages and literatures and government, has been a Swift fan since age 6, when he received a platinum edition copy of “Fearless” for Christmas. So when he saw the course listing, he knew immediately that it was the one. 

“I think I’ll come out of this English class with a greater knowledge of music as a byproduct of studying literature, which is a really unique point of this class,” said Savage, who is looking forward to reading Wordsworth and comparing his poetry to Swift’s album “Folklore.”

Jada Pisani Lee ’26, who is studying computer science, has also been a fan since elementary school. The sophomore said she enrolled in the class to learn more about Swift’s impact on culture, from music to style to copyright law.

While some critics may not consider Swift classically worthy of English class analysis, Burt politely disagrees.

“Half the English-language authors we now think of as ‘classic’ and ‘high culture’ and ‘serious’ were disparaged because they were popular and doing the ‘pop thing’ in their time,” Burt said. “Often the ones who were disparaged because they were doing the ‘pop thing’ were authors who were writing for women when serious prestige classics were the domain of expensively educated white men.”

“Half the English-language authors we now think of as ‘classic’ and ‘high culture’ and ‘serious’ were disparaged because they were popular and doing the ‘pop thing’ in their time.” Stephanie Burt

The professor hopes students will gain not only a deeper appreciation for Swift but a new set of tools for literary and cultural analysis and a greater engagement with authors beyond the pop star.

“If I were not able to connect Taylor’s catalog to various other, older works of literature, I wouldn’t be teaching this class,” Burt said. “But I also wouldn’t be teaching this class if I didn’t really love her songs and find her worthy of sustained, critical attention. She really is that good.”

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Why I Love Taylor Swift by Vincent A. '17

I finally explain the reason...or at least try to...

June 6, 2017

• in Art, Literature, Music ,
• People & Identities

Right before an exam at MIT, I usually spend ten minutes walking down Mass Ave, from Random Hall to wherever the exam will be held. A lot of times, it’s an exam I’m nervous about. In past years, the class average was probably something like a 50% (I’m looking at you 6.046). There’ll be a great time constraint on difficult problems, and an attendant pressure building in my head that goes something like this:

You’ll have to be real creative real fast, or else you can watch your grade plummet.

It’s mostly nerves. Just the brain talking too much, overthinking things, playing out worst-case scenarios. At some point, I learned to just not pay it any attention. In those ten minutes before I’m scribbling away, I put my headphones on and I play some Taylor Swift. My go-to stress-relief jam is usually Shake It Off, and after several hums of “I shake it off, shake it off, I, I, I…”, I’m bobbing my head and feeling better already. It’s largely the lyrics, but it’s also the vehicle of the lyrics–Taylor Swift’s voice.

For at the least the past eight years, Taylor Swift has been my favorite artist (a fact I impress on everybody, family, friends, random stranger standing next to me on the bus). I’m the biggest Swiftie in existence (around the world, pitchforks rise from indignant fans, but I maintain my assertion). I have every song she’s ever released, and dozens she never officially did. I’ve spent an insane number of hours on YouTube watching her music videos, interviews, song mashups. I’ve rocked out to her everywhere, on Rock Band at Alpha Delta Phi, in the shower, while grocery shopping, probably even in my sleep. For the longest time, she’s been one of my role models.

The why is a bit tricky to explain. A lot of it is tangled in details too personal for the blogs, but some of it isn’t, and so I’ll give it a shot.

** I heard my first Taylor Swift song in high school (which in Nigeria runs from grades seven to twelve). It was a boarding high school a few hundred miles away from home, and was quite strict. In particular, most electronic devices were banned–cellphones, laptops, iPods. Which just meant those devices found their way into school anyway. You just had to be really sneaky.

One of my friends snuck in his MP3 player. It had a soundtrack from a Miley Cyrus Disney movie which included the bonus song “Crazier” by Taylor Swift. I was drawn in by the the first line:

I’ve never gone with the wind, just let it flow.

It was a beautiful, laidback song and I was interested in listening to more. But it would be a few more months before my friend had more songs of hers, and in that interval, several things were happening to me. High school gets rough sometimes, especially when bounded by fences and a punishingly familiar routine. Add a sense of awkward self-consciousness and encroaching puberty, and I wasn’t always in the greatest mood.

I was at a point of particular loneliness. The kind that learns to hide its face. I could wear a smile as heavy as dumbbells and carry on with the rest of my day with that poker face, but somewhere inside, I felt isolated from most of my classmates. I spent a lot of time indoors, often perched on the floor writing what would become Sagittarius , an 1800-page all-over-the-place sci-fi series, but when I was out of that world, I didn’t care much for the one my body inhabited.

I had a small group of pretty close friends, and perhaps that should have been enough. For whatever reason, it wasn’t. Part of me was disconnected. On some days, it felt like the world around me was a mirage, illusory somehow. I was a participant, nothing more. These feelings were strange, angsty and pervasive, and in the months between Crazier and the rest of Swift’s material, they persisted.

And when I finally heard more songs from her, they were just…the right songs.

My friend got her first two albums, the eponymous Taylor Swift , released when she was 16, and Fearless, released when she was 18. From that first album, I heard The Outside and for a moment, I was certain that she had dug inside my head, explored my weird mushy state of being, and penned those words for me. Then I heard A Place In This World and Tied Together With a Smile.

These albums also contained a lot of love songs on the spectrum of heartbroken to fulfilled, and I heard those songs at the particular point in time that my wistful yearning for some amorphously defined connection intersected with notions of romance for the first time. I was at a point where I could “get” the appeal of relationships, not just as an abstract thing I recognized when I looked at my parents or any set of couples, but as something I could want and be fulfilled by. I was at the point where, even in my state of mild disconnection, seeing certain people was enough to let my mind wander, run amok, paint rosy images of our shared fairytale, Nameless Soulmate and I.

I think the simpler way to say it is this: at a critical time in my life, growing up, separated from my family and in a high school that could often be alienating, something about her songs provided companionship. I could relate to the descriptions of isolation in songs like The Outside and I could bury myself in an alternate reality, in which a cord bound my heart to someone else’s, in songs like Love Story and Fearless.

There’s something about the way the street looks when it’s just rained; there’s a glow on the pavement, you walk me to the car; and you know I wanna ask you to dance right there, in the middle of the parking lot…

Taylor Swift’s songs came to me for the first time at exactly the right time. A sort of alchemic fusion between her words, her voice, my own ill-defined needs occurred, turning admiration into something quite like idolization, and the more I got to know her (as well as one can hope to know a megastar celebrity anyway), the stronger the fusion grew.

As a kid, she handed out copies of her demos to record labels in Nashville, only to get rejections. She learned how to play the guitar and kept trying. She has a hand in writing every single song she’s ever released. Speak Now , one of my favorite albums ever, possibly my favorite album of anyone ever, had every single song in it single handedly written by Taylor Swift. Swift who would be at a scheduled meet-and-greet with fans and stay for hours beyond the allotted time, just signing autographs and talking to them. Swift who would devote so much time, affection and care to her craft, to her fans, to herself. She became my role model, and still is to this day.

Now, a common rhetoric that arises whenever Taylor Swift comes up is that she’s part of a money-making industry, and ruthlessly cultivates a potentially disingenuous image. That may very well be the biggest flaming pile of nonsense I’ve ever heard. When that much time, effort and affection has been exuded on her part, consistently, day after day, year after year, the image and the person behind the image are virtually indistinguishable. Who people are is often a consequence of what they do, and what she does is write great music, and put real smiles on the faces of millions of people worldwide. She isn’t perfect, but she shouldn’t be expected to be. What she is, is real. Real to me.

Her lyrics have been a formative part of my life since I was 12 and blasting her songs. Often, I’d lock myself in a bathroom in high school, and just play her on repeat. Her voice became familiar and comforting, and so even in songs I couldn’t relate to as much, the vehicle for those songs that was her voice gave them all the power. And years later when I found myself in the United States, at MIT, she would accompany me. On Uber rides. At the T. Before difficult exams. Before sleep.

Sometimes, something would happen. I’d make an awful, stupid mistake and be ridiculously hard on myself. And after a while, I’d come to Innocent, from the Speak Now album, and she would let me know, again and again, that:

I guess you really did it this time Left yourself in your warpath Lost your balance on a tightrope Lost your mind trying to get it back Wasn’t it easier in your lunchbox days Always a bigger bed to crawl into Wasn’t it beautiful when you believed in everything.

And shortly afterward:

Time turns flames to embers You’ll have new Septembers.

When my family was too far away, and sweet memories of them turned into sad reminiscing, I would listen to The Best Day or Never Grow Up . I can’t listen to Never Grow Up for long without tearing up:

Take pictures in your mind of your childhood room, Memorize what it sounded like when your dad gets home, Remember the footsteps, remember the words said, And all your little brother’s favorite songs, I just realized everything I have is someday gonna be gone.

Whether it’s lines like “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you” or “You call me up just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest” from the Red Album or “Shake it off, Shake it OFF” from 1989, Swift’s lyrics find their way into my head all the time.

** I’ve only seen Taylor Swift in person exactly once, and it was as part of the crowd at her 2015 concert in Santa Clara, which played the day after my Los Angeles Internship ended. I took a bus from L.A. to San Francisco, arriving there sometime in the morning. I checked into a cheap hotel room, got some quick breakfast, and made my way to Levi’s Stadium, a good several hours before she was slated to appear.

There were so many Swifties around me, many of them with incredibly sophisticated concert signs. We would talk about everything Taylor Swift, scream alongside the speakers blasting her songs while we waited. After a bit of waiting, we were let into the sitting area, which I got to see slowly fill up.

Vance Joy and Shawn Mendes were the opening acts that night, and as they sang, sunlight bled out of the sky. Night arrived. And with it, extreme excitement from knowing that she was about to spring up on us.

When she did, popping onto that stage, screams filled the stadium, mine joining a thousand others. It must have been enough to rattle the clouds. And right there, in front of us, she sang and danced. I sang and danced along, waving my arms, screaming the words, recording. I was ecstatic.

After the concert ended, the Swifties left the stadium. Finding an Uber took forever, but I eventually made it back to the hotel room, utterly worn out, my voice mostly gone. I passed out instantly, woke up the next day to a screaming alarm clock (I’d been so tired I slept through it and missed my flight to Boston; I was able to catch another one a few hours later though). It didn’t matter though. I’d  seen  Taylor Swift! It’s a night I’ll never forget.

** There’s a certain shamelessness, a certain intensity of affection, that I think we should never constrain for the things and the people we love, things and people, whether it’s Taylor Swift or Superman, that reach into the deepest parts of us and leave their marks there. We love them because they bring that love out of us, somehow, magically, effortlessly.

And there you have it. That’s why I love Taylor Swift.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, would a college essay about taylor swift be off-putting.

Taylor Swift's music has been influential in my life, seriously speaking. It's tempting to write my essay on that influence but I'm worried it might come across as unprofessional or too fangirlish. Could this work or should I play it safe with another topic?

Hey there! Absolutely, a college essay can be about literally any topic, including your passion for Taylor Swift's music, as long as you are able to connect it back to your personal growth or values. The key is to focus on how her music has impacted your life or worldview, rather than simply expressing admiration. For example, perhaps her approach to songwriting inspired you to start journaling or engage with storytelling, or her career evolution influenced your own approach to challenges and adaptation. Admissions officers appreciate essays that provide insight into who you are, what matters to you, and how you think. So if Taylor Swift's music really speaks to you on a personal level beyond being a fan, and if you can articulate that in a reflective and mature way, it could make for an engaging and memorable essay. Just make sure that the essay remains about your personal journey, with Taylor Swift’s influence being the backdrop, not the main focus. Best of luck with your admissions process – shake it off and write from the heart!

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The art of studying Taylor Swift: College campuses embrace themed courses

As Taylor Swift became increasingly synonymous with American pop culture, universities around the country have started creating entire courses dedicated to studying her lyricism and impact.

New York University’s Clive Davis Institute was among the first to offer such a class in 2022 , with lectures taught by Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos. Others have followed suit in the semesters since.

Some courses focus on Swift as a business and marketing mastermind, while others analyze her storytelling techniques with all the detail and skill of poetry analysis.

Professors teaching Swift-inspired classes at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley unpacked their motivations for building entire courses around the 12-time Grammy winner and her discography. They shared the learning objectives of their courses and how students can get an A in “Taylor Swift Studies.”

Harvard University

Name of class: “Taylor Swift and Her World”

Professor: Stephanie Burt, a poet, literary critic and professor of English. An avid Swiftie, Burt said she is “grateful” she can’t sing, or she “would have tried and utterly failed” to make a living as a singer-songwriter herself.

What’s on the syllabus? Students taking the course will be tasked with analyzing Swift’s discography as if they were doing a close reading in a poetry class, identifying rhetorical devices and other literary tools employed by Swift in her work. The syllabus also includes works that Burt chose for “thematic connection” to Swift’s music, including poetry about childhood nostalgia or girlhood, novels about being a performance artist, and essays or works of criticism about singing and songwriting. These works include “The Song of the Lark” by American novelist Willa Cather, selected poems by William Wordsworth, and an academic essay about Taylor Swift and “nostalgic girlhood” by Margaret Rossman. Burt said she intentionally selected work about “being looked at and having to incarnate femininity” that also engages with societal expectations women face to “be hot for men, love yourself and make your own decisions.”

Amount of Swiftie knowledge required: Burt said she expects more people taking this course to come in with some knowledge of Swift’s work than she does when she teaches a George Eliot course, for example. However, she asserts that you do not have to be a Swiftie to take the course or to succeed in it. Burt said this was the “first time” in her academic career that one of her favorite musical artists was also so widely impactful that Harvard’s resources would be well-spent dedicating a course to their discography, not to mention popular enough that students would be compelled to sign up.

How you’d get an A: Students taking the course will have to demonstrate their ability to write “skillfully and concisely” through a series of essays, said Burt. The first paper must be about a Taylor Swift song or an event in Swift’s career, the second about another literary work studied in the class, and the topic of the third paper is up to the discretion of each student. Burt said she hopes students develop a greater appreciation for Swift’s discography and “how it works on people who love it,” as well as a “more nuanced and useful toolkit for literary, cultural and musical analysis” that they can then apply to other topics they think are important or want to talk about.

Name of class: “The Taylor Swift Songbook”

Professor: Elizabeth Scala, a medievalist by training who specializes in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, particularly “The Canterbury Tales.” She called her Swift class a “contemporary turn” in her academic work and created an  Instagram account  to document the course. Her daughter, who is a “huge Swiftie,” gave her the idea to develop a class on Swift’s work during the pandemic.

What’s on the syllabus? Scala said she designed the course around the “formal techniques and literary devices” Swift uses in her music. The beginning of the class focuses on an analysis of several Taylor Swift songs, so that students can “get used to thinking about them structurally,” Scala said. This involves discussing the “anatomy” of a Taylor Swift song, where students have to go through the song slowly and talk about its component parts. This enables students to develop formal language to discuss her storytelling techniques, such as identifying a “repeated feature of the chorus” that changes the third time she sings it and discussing what that might signify. The course subsequently pairs analysis of Swift’s work with “analogous” literary works; for example, Scala pairs “...Ready for It?,” the opening track from “Reputation,” with a Christopher Marlowe poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” Students are tasked with comparing the two works, both of which employ a “fantastical situation,” like the metaphorical robber/heist scenario in Swift’s track.

Amount of Swiftie knowledge required: Though it is certainly not a requirement, Scala expects many of her students to be Swifties from the get-go. Swift’s popularity, she said, makes her work an accessible entry point for developing the critical analysis necessary to succeed in college-level English courses. Scala adapted the course from a class she used to teach at UT Austin about the “Harry Potter” books, which served a similar purpose of using a familiar and popular work to introduce students to literary analysis.

How you’d get an A: Succeeding in the course will require students to develop fluency when discussing and writing about the function of poetic structure in Swift’s work and the complementary literary material. “They’re carrying her music around on their phone all the time, with earbuds in listening to it. … I hope it gives validation to what they like so much about her writing and it’s not just a good song because they like it,” she said. “It’s a good song because it does this and it plays with language in these ways.”

University of Florida

Name of class: “Musical Storytelling With Taylor Swift and Other Iconic Female Artists”

Professor: Melina Jimenez, an English professor at UF with a background in linguistics. She is not a Swiftie herself, but said seeing her students engage in “deep discussions” about Swift before and after class spurred her to create the course.

What’s on the syllabus? Throughout the 13-week course (Swift’s lucky number!), students will explore Swift’s discography and the storytelling tools that make her work so compelling. Jimenez will ask them to pay particular attention to themes like “old flames, infidelity, aging, and double standards” in Swift’s music and discuss criteria for how popular music is “evaluated and situated in current historical context.” The course will also touch on Swift’s musical influences, examining works like “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” by Kitty Wells, which Rolling Stone called “the Fifties equivalent of a modern-day diss track.”

Amount of Swiftie knowledge required: Many fans of Swift will be drawn to the course, but Jimenez said she “wants to learn what makes Swift so interesting for young people.” “And hopefully introduce students to artists that they might not have heard of before, or hadn’t given much thought to because they hadn’t spent the same amount of time with their lyrics.” Non-Swifties may have some catching up to do, but won’t be at too much of a disadvantage.

How you’d get an A: Students will be assessed through discussion board posts and responses, class discussions, and a group project instead of formal essays. They will also annotate two or three songs each week, which will inform class discussions. At the end of the semester, students will work in small groups on a final project, identifying themes in Swift’s discography and devising a project of their choosing. Jimenez said the course is “interested in how Swift and other songwriters construct narratives in their songs,” and successful students will be able to “synthesize common themes” in Swift’s work.

UC Berkeley

Name of class: “Artistry & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version”

Professor: Crystal Haryanto, a Cal economics graduate, formulated the class and will co-teach it with current students. She graduated from Berkeley in spring 2023 after studying economics, cognitive science and public policy. A dedicated Swiftie, Haryanto’s favorite album is “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).”

What’s on the syllabus? The course is a DeCal, or a student-led course undergraduates can enroll in for credit. “It will be a cross section of literature, economics, business and sociology and I think that we’re studying her impact as an artist, as a whole,” Haryanto told NBC Bay Area. The upcoming course has generated so much interest that the course leaders introduced an application process to determine enrollment. Prospective students will have to answer a few questions to make the cut, including, “If you could have a 10-minute version of any Taylor Swift song, what would it be and why?” In addition to exploring her lyricism, the syllabus also includes sections on Swift’s business and marketing strategies, cultural impact, and the success of the “Eras Tour.”

Amount of Swiftie knowledge required: “You don’t need to be a Swiftie to enroll, but don’t say I didn’t, say I didn’t warn ya. You just might become one!” a disclaimer on the course website said .

How you’d get an A: The objectives of the course include identifying “how art and authenticity create enduring value and a viable enterprise,” according to the site. Coursework will include interactive lectures, readings and a final project. Students will be graded on their ability to engage with performance and interview clips, discuss Swift’s portrayal in the media, and write about the role she plays in society. “We’ll put her under scrutiny, but handle it beautifully,” the syllabus states .

I’m the newsroom coordinator for NBC News Digital and cover all things gymnastics, culture and breaking news. My past work includes coverage of Simone Biles’ road to the 2024 Paris Olympics , the death of a fan at Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” and the Vermont shooting of three Palestinian students . You can often find me live-blogging major events in pop culture like the Oscars, the Grammys and the Super Bowl.

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Essay Samples on Taylor Swift

Taylor swift: mastering the art of iconic branding and marketing.

The Power of Taylor Swift's Brand In contrast to Sam Smith and Liam Gallagher, who adhere to conventional marketing and publicity campaigns (Music Week), Taylor Swift has ascended to the status of an iconic legend, boasting an impressive track record of five #1 singles as...

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Contrasting Paths of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry

Introduction Music is one of the most important art that connects people’s feelings and emotions through its melodies and lyrics. Many artists have tried their best to write and produce a perfect song for their fans to listen to and capture the meanings of it....

Three Artifacts: Taylor Swift, Queen and The Handmaid's Tale

Bohemian Rhapsody: Pushing the Boundaries of Rock Bohemian Rhapsody is known as one of the most popular songs nationwide. Written by the legend himself Freddie Mercury and performed by one of the most well-known rock bands Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody is considered one of the greatest...

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Have A Memorable Wedding Day With Taylor Swifts “Fearless”

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. Weddings are the most memorable event in life. Sometimes, it is an event wherein the family will get together. It is...

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1. Taylor Swift: Mastering the Art of Iconic Branding and Marketing

2. Contrasting Paths of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry

3. Three Artifacts: Taylor Swift, Queen and The Handmaid’s Tale

4. Have A Memorable Wedding Day With Taylor Swifts “Fearless”

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College courses about Taylor Swift are popping up. Professors explain why

In recent years, the traditional college course has experienced a significant cultural shift.

College courses about pop sensations like Beyoncé or Rihanna have become somewhat common place, with classes using the musical powerhouses to launch a discourse on race, culture and even Black feminism . Additionally, literature classes, which often focus on 18th century poets, are making the leap into pop culture, thanks to Taylor Swift.

In less than two years, Swift has become a popular subject at various colleges and universities, where students are learning about her song writing and lyricism. Most notably, Harvard is set to launch a spring course called, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” in which students will get to study Swift alongside the famous works of contemporary literature like William Wordsworth and Shakespeare.

Students, who've enrolled or taken the Taylor Swift-inspired courses, are applauding professors for making core classes more relatable and centered on current events instead of focused on historical pieces of literature or "traditional" works.

One of those students is Malia Palmer, 20, a sophomore at University of Texas at Austin, studying sociology, who took one of the first Taylor courses in 2022, “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” before it became a trend.

In an interview with TODAY.com, Palmer speaks on her appreciation for the course which she says didn't center solely on Sylvia Plath and other type of "stodgy" literature she'd grown accustomed to.

She also talks about how taking an English course, which used Swift as a subject for lectures when studying classic works like Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," made class more interesting.

Palmer says Swift's 2008 hit track "Love Story," was studied in relation to the romantic playwright, given her clear reference to the characters in the song.

"That you were Romeo, you were throwin' pebbles / And my daddy said, 'Stay away from Juliet'" TAYLOR SWIFT IN HER 2008 HIT, "Love Story"

With Swift's emblematic catalogue of music, it's not surprising that the singer has become the subject matter at major universities like Rice, NYU, and Stanford.

At Stanford, the course called "The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling With Taylor Swift through the Eras," will be taught by second-year undergraduate Ava Jeffs in the spring.

Although Jeff, who is majoring in computer science, is not a professor, her love of Swift prompted her to create a syllabus based on the vocalist so that she could teach other students about the value of her songs in relation to literary works. She says that her interest in introducing Swift to the classroom stemmed from her desire to "challenge" student perceptions of classic literature.

Why are so many colleges offering Taylor courses?

Professor Elizabeth Scala, who teaches English at the University of Texas at Austin talks about her course titled “The Taylor Swift Songbook” that launched in Fall 2022.

Before Taylor courses became popular, Scala recounts her personal experience creating the class, which was taught to first-year college students.

The class, which was first teased as a "secret Harry Potter course," that focused on British literature and medieval literary traditions within J.K. Rowling's popular novels, eventually evolved into a seminar on Swift after Scala discussed Taylor's "All Too Well" with her daughter. This is when she says she discovered that Swift's song had a strong connection to historic literature.

"I want to say the semester before I taught the course I was getting ready to order my books and thought, 'what would it be like if I flipped that Harry Potter course into a Taylor Swift course?'" Scala says.

During an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, Swift commented on the metaphors within her song "All Too Well."

The singer stated that the scarf in the 2021 "All Too Well" music video "is a metaphor and we turned it red because red is a very important color in this album, which is called 'Red.'"

As for Scala's thoughts on why so many colleges are jumping on the Swiftie bandwagon, she says, Taylor Swift is both the "hook" and "hard sell" for professors to reignite student's interest in classic literature.

Scala also acknowledges Harvard's recent Taylor Swift addition to its course offerings. She lightheartedly quips, “Now Harvard has stuck its nose in the soup and everybody’s interested. I'm like, guess what people, I was first." However, Scala, who received her PhD from the Harvard, only has good things to say about her former alma mater.

"I love that there are so many courses" centered on Swift, she says before adding that all the courses "uniquely differ."

At Rice University, undergraduate student, Katherine Jeng, a junior studying English and Social Policy Analysis, teaches a 1-credit Swiftie course called "Miss Americana: The Evolution and Lyrics of Taylor Swift."

The class offered to Rice undergraduates is taught in “chronological order” of Swift’s albums from her debut released in 2006 to her most recent album, “Midnights,” released in 2022, Jeng explains.

Like Scala, she too points out the singer's relevance and notes the criticism that comes with starting a course centered on the singer. "Some people believe that her lyrics are just pop hits and that there’s not really any depth to them," Jeng says.

She continues, “I wanted to challenge this notion and highlight her songwriting abilities, while also getting to talk about my favorite artist."

What do students think of the courses?

Students at Rice University and University of Texas at Austin (UT) are also weighing in on what they love about these Swift-inspired courses and their assignments.

Anna Grace Holloway, 20, is a philosophy and government double major in the Liberal Arts honors program at UT. The sophomore undergraduate talks about her "newfound appreciation" for Swift following Professor Scala's course.

"I always knew that she was a great songwriter," but was "most surprised to see the parallels" between both Swift's work and classic literature.

She recalls a noteworthy assignment where the class watched the famous Alfred Hitchcock film, "Rebecca," based on the 1938 Gothic novel by Daphne Du Maurier. The class compared it to Swift's 2020 "Evermore" track, "Tolerate It," which tells a similar story of tragic love, she explains.

In an interview with Apple Music , Swift explained that "Tolerate It" was largely inspired by “Rebecca."

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, her husband just tolerates her. She’s doing all these things and she’s trying so hard and she’s trying to impress him, and he’s just tolerating her the whole time,’” she said. “There was a part of me that was relating to that, because at some point in my life, I felt that way.”

For Holloway the course was especially significant, because out of the 17 students who enrolled in the class at the time of its 2022 launch, Swift's early co-writer, Liz Rose, signed on to teach a session on songwriting. Rose is responsible for penning tracks such as "White Horse" and "You Belong with Me."

The class also got to make "friendship bracelets for [Swift's] "Eras" tour concerts" to conclude a successful semester, and both Holloway and Palmer even got to sport them while attending concerts in Denver and Houston.

Scala herself even got in on the bracelet making fun.

As more classes about the singer continue to pop up, the consensus is clear: Taylor Swift is reawakening curiosity in the classroom. Whether she's being compared to literary works of art, studied as a tool used in politics or to boost the economy , professors and students acknowledge that Swift is a force to be reckoned with.

19-year old Isabella Campos, a sophomore at Rice University studying English and anthropology, agrees, adding that "Regardless of if you’re a huge Swiftie, you can still take a step back and look objectively at her songwriting and lyricism to find something compelling there."

Jennamichelle Merolla is part of the TODAY Page program and graduated with her master's in integrated marketing communication this past December.

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Students will explore Taylor Swift’s lyrics as literature in new course

In new student-initiated course, students will apply literary analysis tools to Taylor Swift’s lyrics to gain new insights into her multilayered music.

Taylor Swift’s prolific output and quality live performances have delivered her to the pinnacle of pop stardom. But if Swift has cultural staying power, it will likely result from her songwriting skills and smart lyrics, where one can find allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Wordsworth, and Pablo Neruda.

Swift’s songwriting will become the subject of academic debate at Stanford this spring through four new courses. The superstar’s inclusion in the university’s educational offerings comes thanks in part to energetic, Swift-loving sophomore Ava Jeffs. Like many fans, Jeffs describes feeling like she grew up with Swift as the star moved from teen boyfriend songs to more sophisticated narratives tackling larger literary themes.

Jeffs will co-teach TAPS 89SI: The Last Great American Songwriter: Storytelling with Taylor Swift through the Eras , a student-initiated course (SIC) that will dive into Swift’s musical storytelling and literary lyrics.

“When the first Swift class came up at NYU, focusing on her celebrity, it got me intrigued about bringing more modern figures into our curriculum,” Jeffs said. “I was curious about what it would look like to develop a class around her and her music.”

When Jeffs approached Gabriella Safran , senior associate dean for the humanities and arts in the School of Humanities and Sciences, to ask how she might engage her peers in analyzing Swift’s songs, Safran suggested that Jeffs propose a SIC. Marina Johnson, a graduate student in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, has since worked with Jeffs to turn the idea into a syllabus. Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies and professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Johnson will serve as the instructors of record for the course.

“The tools we have to analyze verbal art are useful, and Ava can help her students learn to apply them,” Safran said. “The university can help Ava get some tools around structuring a class, time management, and class management.”

“It’s time to teach some lessons”

Like Swift’s Eras tour, the topics explored in the course progress album by album. The syllabus pairs a specific interpretive focus with each album to encourage students to apply their textual analysis skills to Swift’s lyrics. For example, one week students will consider symbolism and foreshadowing on the album 1989 . In another week, they will consider Swift’s use of fictional characters to drive narratives in her album Evermore . The course will also lay out the common pop song structures to show how formal manipulation can create meaning.

“As I got more into reading the words, I started to get intrigued about how you could apply your literary analysis to that medium of storytelling,” Jeffs said.

For instance, the class might explore how the chorus of Swift’s murder ballad “No Body, No Crime” plays with pop formulas. Following a common formula, each chorus repeats the same lyrical hooks: “I think he did it, but I just can’t prove it” and “no body, no crime.” But in each iteration, these lines take on new meanings as the song’s plot progresses through successive verses.

Student-initiated courses

Introduced in 2013, SICs enable undergraduates to develop and lead courses with support and mentoring from Stanford faculty and graduate students. In this case, Jeffs, Johnson, and Safran shaped the TAPS 89SI syllabus. Jeffs will lead course discussions with guidance from Johnson, who will be on hand at all class meetings.

SICs are considered activity courses, like most physical education, wellness, and outdoor courses as well as the thematic classes students in programs such as ITALIC take. Students can obtain less than five percent of the credits they need to graduate through these courses, which are one or two credits each and only offered pass/fail.

The benefit to student course leaders is straightforward.

“Students tend to spend most of their time being students and being on the receiving end of education,” Safran said. “For a student to get the experience of thinking about how to design and deliver a class offers incredibly important, useful life skills.”

Johnson champions peer-to-peer learning as a boon for enrolling students. She became Jeffs’ mentor for The Last Great American Songwriter after she served a similar role last spring for a one-unit, student-led ITALIC course on Taylor Swift’s video for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).”

“One of the things I love about teaching is that it doesn’t have to happen in a very prescriptive way, as long as there’s a pedagogically sound approach,” Johnson said. “There’s an engagement on a different level when you’re learning from a peer about something about which they’re very passionate and know a lot.”

There are guardrails in place to support students co-teaching SICs. Student course leaders must complete online pedagogical training and work closely with an instructor of record, who oversees the curriculum and submits grades.

Welcoming the new

One of the benefits of SICs is they can help bring new cultural forms and ideas in for academic analysis.

“Our students are interested in the present,” Safran said. “We are also interested in the present. Across the university, people are studying the present in different ways.”

To investigate the literary meanings or merit of Swift’s lyrics, critics have to rely on tried-and-true methods of literary scholarship, such as looking for themes, modifications to widely used forms, and allusions to other writers.

“If you’re a humanities researcher, you’re trained mostly to join a conversation that’s already going on, about familiar issues and materials,” Safran said. “If you want to write about something new, something that just happened, you have to stretch. Older material can help anchor you as you analyze the contemporary material and teach your students to analyze it.”

This course is not the only new course to discuss Taylor Swift. Other Stanford courses will also apply proven methods of analysis to Swift’s new forms of expression. They include A Brief History of Now: Song and Poetry from Sappho to Taylor Swift , taught by Marisa Galvez, professor of French and Italian, and Harry Carter, graduate student in comparative literature; and Taylor Swift and Millennial America , taught by Theresa Iker , postdoctoral fellow in history.

“Taylor Swift is very literate in the sense that she’s citing all these canonical writers,” Safran said. “That's part of her appeal. In the new TAPS course, the students can excavate some of these references and figure out what Swift is doing with them.”

Media contact:  Joy Leighton, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences: joy [dot] leighton [at] stanford [dot] edu (joy[dot]leighton[at]stanford[dot]edu)

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Did Taylor Swift Go To College? Everything To Know About The Pop Star's New Honorary Doctorate Degree From NYU

It was actually the first time she put on a cap and gown.

The singer, 32, joked with Vogue a while ago, saying she really wanted to get an honorary doctorate because Ed Sheeran has one. Enter NYU to save the day!

As she headed off to get her degree, the pop star shared on TikTok that she was “wearing a cap and gown for the very first time - see you soon NYU 🥺🥰🗽 #swifttok #classof2022 ." And also shared images of herself getting ready for the big day.

Taylor received a Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa , BTW. “I’m 90% sure that the reason I’m here is because I have a song called ‘22,'” she joked in her commencement speech.

She continued, “I’d to thank NYU for making me technically, on paper at least, a doctor. Not the type of doctor you would want around in the event of an emergency.” But, she said, she’s a good doctor to have handy if you need a song “with catchy hook and an intensely cathartic bridge section” or “that you needed a person who can name over 50 breeds of cat in one minute.”

Of course, everyone had a lot of questions about her degree and the fact she had apparently never donned a cap and gown before. What diplomas does she have? (Besides, ya know, the diploma of ultra-famous stardom.) Here’s what you need to know.

Did Taylor go to college?

Nope. Her career took off when she was around 15 and it was kinda hard to fit college into the mix then. Understandable.

Taylor did, however, go to high school at Hendersonville High School in Tennessee for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy. The transfer meant she was better able to work around her touring schedule with homeschooling. She graduated a year early. High school diploma: check.

“I never got to have the normal college experience, per se,” she said in her speech. “I went to public high school until tenth grade and finished my education doing homeschool work on the floors of airport terminals. Then I went out on the road on a radio tour, which sounds incredibly glamorous but in reality it consisted of a rental car, motels, and my mom and I pretending to have loud mother-daughter fights with each other during boarding so no one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest.”

But now she can add one more to that list: doctorate.

What is an “honorary doctorate degree”?

An honorary degree is a degree—usually a doctorate like the one Tay just got—that’s given to someone who didn’t go to that school or didn’t complete a similar level of education required to receive the degree. (So, no, Taylor never went to or studied at NYU.) Basically, the school waives all the requirements needed to obtain a specific degree.

Why? It's a way for an institution to honor the accomplishments and contributions an individual has made in a particular field. Like Taylor and the arts.

And supportive boyfriend Joe Alwyn certainly seems to agree that it's a big deal.

"It’s an incredible honor, it’s absolutely amazing," he told Extra in an interview.

Wait, but why is she getting this degree?

Well, NYU has been a big Swiftie for a while now. The school’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music launched a course in January that was dedicated to Taylor’s business and writing practices. It also looked at how fandom, gender, and race come together in the music industry.

NYU had this to say about Taylor in a press release about her degree:

“An 11-time Grammy winner, Ms. Swift is one of the most prolific and celebrated artists of her generation. She is the only female artist in history to win the music industry’s highest honor, the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, three times. Her many awards and distinctions include being the most awarded artist ever in American Music Awards’ history along with being named Artist of the Decade; winner of the BRIT Awards International Female Solo Artist of the Year in 2015 and the Global Icon Award in 2021; and Billboard’s first-ever and only two-time winner of the Woman of the Decade Award."

Whew! That's...a lot.

And what did she have to say in her speech?

Taylor cracked plenty of jokes (see above) but she also gave some really heartfelt words of encouragement to the class of 2022.

“Not a single one of us here today has done it alone,” she said. “We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures, those who showed us empathy and kindness or told us the truth even when it wasn’t easy to hear. … I hope you’ll find your own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this common destination.”

“I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that,” she later said, but she did offer up some really great advice. “You can’t carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. Decide what is yours to hold and let the rest go," she shared. Truth!

So...will she go by “Dr. Swift” now?

Probably only for fun. While she seems really, really stoked about her degree, Tay’s Instagram profile doesn’t make any mention of it…yet.

But Swifties already know she's got a PhD in Making People Feel All The Feels.

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Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison

The first time I heard about Taylor Swift , I was in a Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the Los Angeles Times , and they would be passed from one reader to the next. Back then, I swore that Prince was the best songwriter of my lifetime, and I thought Swift’s rise to teen-age stardom was an injustice. I’d look up from her wide-eyed face in the Calendar section to see gang fights and race riots. The jail was full of young men of color who wrote and performed their own raps, often about chasing money and fame, while Swift was out there, actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blond fluff like that really be?

In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I boarded a bus in shackles and a disposable jumpsuit, and rode to Calipatria State Prison, a cement fortress on the southern fringes of California. Triple-digit temperatures, cracked orange soil, and pungent whiffs of the nearby Salton Sea made me feel as though I’d been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries, like a television. The thick walls of Calipat, as we called the place, stifled our radio reception, but an institutional antenna delivered shows like “Access Hollywood,” “Entertainment Tonight,” and “TMZ.” I was irritated by the celebrity gossip, but it was a connection to the outside world, and it introduced me to snippets of Swift’s performances for the first time. Here and there, I’d catch her on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” or “Fallon,” and was surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn’t tell anyone that I thought she was talented.

Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour Listen to Joe Garcia read “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison.”

In 2013, when my security level was lowered owing to good behavior, I requested a transfer to Solano state prison, the facility with a Level 3 yard which was closest to my family in the Bay Area. I got the transfer, but my property—a TV, CD player, soap, toothpaste, lotion, food—was lost in transit. I shared a cell with someone in the same situation, so, for months, we relied on the kindness of our neighbors to get by. Our only source of music was a borrowed pocket radio, hooked up to earbuds that cost three dollars at the commissary. At night, we’d crank up the volume and lay the earbuds on the desk in our cell. Those tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of Top Forty hits.

During that time, I heard tracks from “Red,” Swift’s fourth studio album, virtually every hour. I was starting to enjoy them. Laying on the top bunk, I would listen to my cellmate’s snores and wait for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to come around again. When it did, I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years, before prison. I remembered bittersweet times when my sweetheart had visited me in county jail. We’d look at each other through security glass that was reinforced by wire. It didn’t seem fair to expect her to wait for me, and I told her that she deserved a partner who could be with her. But we didn’t use the word “never,” and deep down I always hoped that we’d get back together. When I heard “Everything Has Changed,” I had to fight back tears of exaltation and grief. Swift sings, “All I knew this morning when I woke / Is I know something now / Know something now I didn’t before.” I thought back to our first date, and how we had talked and laughed late into the night. We had to force ourselves to get a few hours of sleep before sunrise.

After several months, my belongings, including my CD player, finally caught up with me. I was getting ready to buy “Red” from a catalogue of approved CDs when I learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., had placed me on another transfer list. I didn’t want the album to get stuck at the prison after I had been transferred, so I resorted to a country station that regularly featured Swift. Sometimes, hearing Southern drawls and honky-tonk medleys, I’d laugh out loud at myself. But that was the station that played the widest variety of her music, from “Tim McGraw” to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.

Hitting a new yard—in this case, the prison known as the California Men’s Colony (C.M.C.)—means finding new friends and allies. Each table and workout area was claimed by a different gang or ethnic group. I’m Asian and Hispanic, and I chose to join the Asians in a cement workout area. When they asked me what kind of music I liked, I confessed that I was anxiously waiting for a Taylor Swift album. Everyone laughed. “Oh, my God, we’ve got a Swiftie on the yard!” Lam, a muscular guy, told me. “You in touch with your sensitive side? Are you gay?” He especially loved to heckle me in front of his buddy Hung, who spoke little and laughed almost silently.

I was waiting for “Red” to arrive when I saw Swift perform “All Too Well” at the 2014 Grammys. That became the song that I played first when I peeled the plastic wrap off the disc, and the song I’d stop at and repeat whenever I spun the album. (Her ten-minute version is even better.) As Swift sang about love’s magical moments, how they are found and lost again, I thought about a time before my incarceration, when I briefly broke up with the woman I loved. She came to my house to return one of my T-shirts. When she hung it on the doorknob and walked away, I was on the other side. I sensed that someone was there, but, by the time I opened the door, she was gone.

When “Red” arrived, I finally found out why Lam had been clowning me in front of Hung. “Red” was the only Swift CD that Hung didn’t own—because he considered it a misguided pop departure from the country greatness of “Fearless” and “Speak Now.” Eventually, Lam outed himself as a Swiftie, too. For six months, the three of us would work out and debate which album was best. Then Hung transferred out of the prison, taking his CDs with him.

Around the time Swift dropped “1989,” I acquired an old-school boom box. Technically, exchanging property and altering devices is against C.D.C.R. rules, but every prison has guys who fill their cells with radios, TVs, and speakers to repair and resell. I looked out for one guy, G.L., when he first hit the yard, and he became one of the best electronic fix-it guys I’ve ever met. He loved reconfiguring different speakers to get the best sound. He rewired the boom box for auxiliary cables and gave it to me. At C.M.C., I had a cell to myself, so I’d turn up the music enough to drown out obnoxious sounds outside my cell. Of course, some people always think that Swift is the obnoxious sound. “What’s up with the damn Taylor Swift?” a neighbor yells out. Another voice chimes in with requests: “Play ‘Style.’ That song’s tight right there.” By the time the song ends, someone new will admit, “That girl’s got jams.”

When you transfer between prisons, you can’t take any undocumented property with you. At the end of 2015, I gave that boom box back to G.L. and left C.M.C. for Folsom prison. After a year, I landed at San Quentin. I started working at the San Quentin News , the in-house newspaper, for a quarter an hour. Around that time, C.D.C.R. started allowing a vender to sell us MP3 players for a hundred dollars. They charged $1.75 per song and ten dollars for a memory card. Eventually, I asked my family to order one and would call my cousin Roxan with requests. “What’s up with all the damn Taylor Swift?” she’d say during phone calls. By the time Swift released her album “Lover,” in 2019, I had almost every song she’d ever released. And, when the MP3 players were restricted because crafty folks were using the memory cards in illegal cell phones, mine was grandfathered in.

One of my homies at San Quentin had a pristine radio that played CDs and cassette tapes. When he earned parole, everybody hounded him for it. He knew how much I’d appreciate such a luxury, but I didn’t join the herd of pesterers making offers, and I think he appreciated that. He gave it to me as a parting gift. I was even able to have it officially documented on my property card. The MP3 player clipped neatly into the cassette door, so now I could see my playlists while I listened. My neighbor, Rasta, was the weed man for the building, so I played Swift to drown out the guys who were lighting up outside. Rasta made fun of me, but the crowd always liked her “Bad Blood” remix, featuring Kendrick Lamar . “That’s the shit right there,” they’d say. “Who would’ve thought?”

Seven months after “Lover” came out, C.D.C.R. shut down all programming because of the COVID pandemic —no indoor group interactions, no volunteers from outside the prison, no visitors. C.D.C.R. brought the coronavirus into San Quentin when it moved some sick guys from another prison in. By the end of June, 2020, hundreds of us were testing positive and getting sick, including me. I lugged all my property to an isolation cell in a quarantine unit, where I shivered and sweated through a brain fog for two weeks. My only human contact came from nurses in full-body P.P.E., who checked my vitals, and skeleton crews of officers—the ones who weren’t sick themselves—who brought us intermittent meals. I followed San Quentin’s death tallies on the local news. Would I die alone in this cell, suddenly and violently breathless? I made a playlist of Swift’s most uplifting songs, listening for the happiness in her voice.

Alone in a prison cell, it’s virtually impossible to avoid oneself. As my body and mind began to recover, I started to question everything. What really matters? Who am I? What if I die tomorrow? I hadn’t been in touch with my sweetheart in more than two years, because she had told me that she was trying a relationship with someone who cared about her. Now, though, I wrote her a letter to see if she was O.K.

A week after I mailed my letter, I received one from her. Prison mail is slow enough that I knew it wasn’t a response—we had decided to write to each other at the same time. “The lockdown has afforded me plenty of time to reflect on all sorts of things,” her letter said. “I’ve been carrying you with me everywhere.” Reading it brought to mind Swift’s lyrics in “Daylight”: “I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you.” She was single again, and we started talking every week. In lockdown, between paltry dinner trays, I did pushups, lunges, squats, and planks in the twenty-two-inch-wide floor space in my cell. The twentieth year of my incarceration was approaching.

In 2020, the California legislature passed a law that made anyone who served twenty continuous years, and who was at least fifty years of age, eligible for parole. I’m fifty-three, and I’ll get my first chance at release in 2024. I couldn’t help but think of “Daylight” again. “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night,” Swift sings. “And now I see daylight.”

These days, I call my sweetheart as often as I can. Officers can shut down the phones with the flick of a switch, and technical glitches often take the system offline, so I treat each call as if it were my last. It often feels like she’s waiting to hear from me. She tells me that it’s complicated and confusing for her, speaking to the ghost who disappeared twenty years ago. But, leaning against a wall, next to all the other guys talking with loved ones on the phone, I don’t feel like a ghost. I feel alive. Just recently, she told me, “Talking like this over the phone so much, I think we’ve gotten to know each other way better than before.” We talk about how much we have changed. “You might not even find me attractive anymore,” she tells me. “I’m not the same person I was back then.”

One morning in October, 2022, I had breakfast in the chow hall and made it back to my cell in time for “Good Morning America.” My TV doesn’t have any speakers, so I plugged it into my boom box. Suddenly, I heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar chorus: “It’s me, hi / I’m the problem, it’s me.” The anchors on the broadcast were giddy to announce Swift’s new album “Midnights,” and play clips from the music video of “Anti-Hero.” Swift appeared as a larger-than-life figure, arguing with different versions of herself. I laughed to myself. Here we go again.

Our MP3 distributor was always slow to release new music, so I spent a couple of weeks hearing about the album on the news, waiting for my chance to listen. Then, out on the prison grounds, I bumped into a volunteer whom I’d known and worked with for years. We were walking through the yard together when they started looking around to make sure no one was watching. After confirming that the coast was clear, they slipped me a brand-new copy of “Midnights” and wished me a happy birthday. The gesture nearly brought me to tears. That evening, after dinner, I peeled off the plastic and brushed a bit of dust out of the boom box’s CD player. “Lavender Haze” played as I read the liner notes. “What keeps you up at night?” Swift writes.

For the past two decades, sleep has not come easily to me. Often, when I get into bed, I think about the day I was arrested at the scene of my crime. Some neighbors called 911 and reported gunshots. I can still see the grieving family members of the man I killed, staring at me in the courtroom at my trial. I’m guilty of more than murder. I abandoned my parents and my sweetheart, too. There’s no way to fix this stuff.

Taylor Swift is currently the same age, thirty-three, that I was when I was arrested. I wonder whether her music would have resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” Swift sings, and I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?

In “Karma,” Swift sings, “Ask me what I learned from all those years / Ask me what I earned from all those tears.” A few months from now, California’s Board of Parole Hearings will ask me questions like that. What have I learned? What do I have to show for my twenty years of incarceration? In the months ahead, when these questions keep me up at night, I will listen to “Midnights.” The woman I love says she’s ready to meet me on the other side of the prison wall, on the day that I walk into the daylight. Recently, she asked me, “If you could go anywhere, do anything, that first day out, what would you want us to go do?” That question keeps me up at night, too. ♦

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Texas university students will analyse Taylor Swift lyrics in new undergraduate course

AUSTIN, TEXAS - Over the years, American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has inspired legions of fans to fervently dissect her song lyrics for special clues about her personal life and relationships.

And now they can do it for college credit, as the University of Texas at Austin launches a new undergraduate course called The Taylor Swift Songbook.

English professor Elizabeth Scala will be teaching it as part of the university's liberal arts honours programme.

In a press release on its website, the university noted that Swift's songs will provide a "distinctly contemporary lens" to the study of literary traditions and forms, alongside the more historical works of William Shakespeare, Robert Frost and John Keats.

Prof Scala noted that the course is a new way to expose formal literary criticism to younger people.

She said: "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."

This is not the first university course inspired by the 32-year-old pop star.

Earlier this year, New York University's Clive Davis Institute launched a course about her life and career as a "creative music entrepreneur".

It culminated in Swift herself showing up at the university's commencement ceremony in May to receive an honorary doctorate, and deliver a speech to her "fellow" graduates.

"I started writing songs when I was 12 and since then, it's been the compass guiding my life, and in turn, my life guided my writing," she noted in her speech.

"Everything I do is just an extension of my writing, whether it's directing videos or a short film, creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on stage performing. Everything is connected by my love of the craft."

Elsewhere in Texas, undergraduates at Texas State University will have the opportunity to study another pop star - English singer Harry Styles, formerly of boy band One Direction.

The course, titled Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture, is expected to begin next year.

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Taylor Swift's 2019 Essay Revealed How Concert Violence Was One of Her 'Biggest Fears'

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Taylor Swift has been vigilant about concert safety for years, and the fact that she had to cancel three concerts in Vienna, Austria tells you just how serious the terrorist threat was. Even though two suspects have been arrested, government officials erred on the side of caution while they look other people who are possibly involved. For Swift, this was a nightmare come true.

In 2019, she wrote an ELLE essay on “30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30.” Under the topic of “My biggest fear,” Swift discussed how “the Manchester Arena bombing and the Vegas concert shooting ” impacted her as an artist. “I was completely terrified to go on tour this time because I didn’t know how we were going to keep 3 million fans safe over seven months,” she revealed. “There was a tremendous amount of planning, expense, and effort put into keeping my fans safe.” Understandably, her high-profile profession requires a lot of security and planning, but those violent incidents also made her change aspects of her personal life, too.

More from SheKnows

Travis Kelce Is Reportedly Making Big Moves To Prepare for Taylor Swift's Tour Hiatus

“My fear of violence has continued into my personal life. I carry QuikClot army grade bandage dressing, which is for gunshot or stab wounds,” she wrote while criticizing “websites and tabloids” for doxing her home addresses online. “You get enough stalkers trying to break into your house and you kind of start prepping for bad things,” she added. Swift isn’t wrong to worry about her fans and her personal safety, Sandra Bullock’s terrifying home invasion experience feels traumatic to read about even years later.

In 2014, Bullock was home alone because her then-four-year-old son Louis stayed at the nanny’s house that evening. “It was the one night that our nanny goes, ‘Let me just take him to my apartment which is up the street because you’re gonna be out late,’” Bullock told Red Table Talk . “Had he been home, I would’ve run to the closet, and it would have changed our destiny forever.” A stalker had broken into her Bel Air residence while she was sleeping. He was there for more than an hour before she realized an intruder had broken in, according to CNN. The incident changed Bullock’s life forever . “I wasn’t the same after that. I was unraveling. I haven’t been alone since the day it happened,” she admitted.

So, Swift and other A-list celebrities’ concerns about safety are valid — and it’s a global issue for them. But as Swift reminded everyone in 2019, there is still “good in the world.” She noted, “We have to live bravely in order to truly feel alive, and that means not being ruled by our greatest fears.” Still, this major scare will change security for her Wembley Stadium concerts that are still scheduled from Aug. 15-20, and her rumored cameo at the Closing Ceremony at the Olympics.

Before you go, click here to see more celebrities who have suffered through home invasions.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Role Models — Taylor Swift is my Role Model

Taylor Swift is My Role Model

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Updated: 8 December, 2023

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Security Expert Explains ‘Underlying Reasons’ Why Taylor Swift Concert Was Targeted for Terror Act

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Taylor Swift ’s canceled Eras Tour concerts in Vienna “highlight the increased security risks associated with large-scale events,” security expert Morgan Stevens exclusively told Us Weekly.

Stevens, who is the vice president of intelligence operations at Crisis24 Private Strategic Group , explained that “bigger shows” like the record-breaking Eras Tour pose “greater risks” to artists and attendees alike.

“Large concerts like Taylor Swift's draw tens of thousands of assailable fans, making them attractive targets for potential attackers aiming to maximize impact, attention and casualties,” Stevens told Us on Thursday, August 8. “It's widely reported that the Vienna concerts were expected to draw 70,000 fans each night, with similar concerts attracting an additional 10,000 to 20,000 outside the arena.”

Swift, 34, was due to headline three Eras concerts at Austria’s Ernst Happel Stadium between Thursday and Saturday, August 10. The shows were canceled on Wednesday, August 7, after local police arrested two men for allegedly planning an attack at the arena. A raid on the home of one of the suspects, a 19-year-old with alleged ties to ISIS, revealed a stockpile of chemical substances. An investigation is currently ongoing to determine whether the materials could have been used to build an atomic weapon.

Details Emerge Regarding Planned Terror Attack at Taylor Swift Concert: Everything to Know

According to Stevens, shows like Swift’s are primarily targeted for a “shock and awe” value.

“High-profile events, especially the reported Eras Tour, have received extensive media coverage, which can amplify the visibility of an attack,” Stevens told Us . “This publicity is often a goal for attackers seeking to spread fear through their physical message.”

He continued, “The larger the event, the more challenging it becomes to secure. Ensuring the safety of attendees, its talent and staff involves coordinating multiple security agencies with competing agendas and priorities. This can lead to increases in miscommunication and adds to the potential for oversights or lapses in security.”

Stevens further noted that with such types of “high-profile events” comes more attention from those “intending to commit nefarious acts of terrorism or violence.”

Every Viral Moment From Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’: Ghosts, Babies, Conspiracy Theories and More

“While the popularity of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour does make the event a more prominent target, the underlying reasons are rooted in the characteristics of large public gatherings,” Stevens said, noting the assailants often look for a place to “cause maximum harm.”

Swift has not publicly addressed the situation, which Stevens compared to the 2017 bombing at Ariana Grande ’s Manchester Arena concert. The British incident incited a longstanding fear in Swift.

“My biggest fear. After the Manchester Arena bombing and the Vegas concert shooting, I was completely terrified to go on tour this time because I didn’t know how we were going to keep 3 million fans safe over seven months,” Swift previously wrote in a 2019 essay for Elle. “My fear of violence has continued into my personal life. I carry QuikClot army grade bandage dressing, which is for gunshot or stab wounds. … You get enough stalkers trying to break into your house and you kind of start prepping for bad things.”

According to Stevens, Swift is likely working with a security team, similar to Stevens’ GardaWorld firm, to ensure everyone’s safety at her concerts moving forward. (Swift next performs her Eras Tour at London’s Wembley Stadium later this month.)

Every Time Taylor Swift Has Asked Security to Help Fans During ‘Eras Tour’

“We work with a number of high-profile individuals and organizations. At Crisis24 Private Strategic Group, our high-profile clients benefit from a multilayered security apparatus,” Stevens said, noting clients employ personal security professionals and work with the event team. “At static locations such as meetings, events and venues, additional security measures are put in place.”

Firms like Crisis24 also make sure that there is “threat assessment and contingency planning” long before anything takes place.

“When not on tour or traveling, high-profile residences are protected by state-of-the-art security systems, including alarms, surveillance cameras and trained security personnel,” Stevens said, adding that his colleagues help combat online threats as well.

With reporting by Sarah Jones

Philipp-Moritz Jenne, Associated Press Philipp-Moritz Jenne, Associated Press

Stefanie Dazio, Associated Press Stefanie Dazio, Associated Press

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/authorities-arrest-3rd-person-over-foiled-conspiracy-targeting-vienna-taylor-swift-concerts

Authorities arrest 3rd person over foiled conspiracy targeting Vienna Taylor Swift concerts

VIENNA (AP) — Austrian authorities on Friday announced a third arrest in connection with the foiled conspiracy to attack three now-canceled Taylor Swift concerts, even as disappointed fans charmed Vienna by trading friendship bracelets and singing the pop star’s songs in the streets.

WATCH: New details emerge on Vienna terror plots behind Taylor Swift concert cancellations

The main suspect, a 19-year-old, planned to target onlookers gathered outside Ernst Happel Stadium — up to 30,000 each night, with another 65,000 inside the venue — with knives or homemade explosives during the concert on Thursday or Friday. The suspect hoped to “kill as many people as possible,” authorities said .

He was taken into custody on Tuesday, along with a 17-year-old, officials said. Both are Austrian citizens.

The third suspect, an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen, was arrested Thursday evening, the interior minister said at an unrelated news conference Friday.

A 15-year-old was also interrogated but was not arrested. Their names were not released, in line with Austrian privacy rules.

Swift is still set to travel to London’s Wembley stadium for five concerts between Aug. 15 and 20 to close the European leg of her record-setting Eras Tour.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said that while he understood Vienna’s reasons for canceling , “We’re going to carry on.”

Still, the Vienna plot drew comparisons to a 2017 attack by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. The bomb detonated at the end of Grande’s concert as thousands of young fans were leaving, becoming the deadliest extremist attack in the United Kingdom in recent years.

Coldplay is scheduled to play four nights at the same Vienna stadium later this month.

Authorities said the scheme was inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaida. The main suspect, as well as the 18-year-old arrested Friday, pledged “an oath of allegiance” to the Islamic State group.

Investigators discovered bomb-making materials at the main suspect’s home, as well as Islamic State group and al-Qaida material at the 17-year-old’s home. That suspect, who has so far refused to talk, was employed a few days ago by a company providing unspecified services at the venue for the concerts.

Although the 18-year-old swore the oath and “comes from the social environment” of the main suspect, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said, he is not directly linked to the plot.

The Austrian Interior Ministry, in a statement Friday to The Associated Press, said “his arrest underscores the broad scope of the ongoing investigation. Authorities are taking decisive action against anyone who might be involved in terrorist activities or exhibits radical tendencies.”

Investigators are scrutinizing the “networks” of the suspects, the statement said, and have turned to evaluating physical and electronic evidence.

Shiraz Maher, an expert on Islamic extremism with the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said in a statement to the AP that attackers “prioritize casualties and therefore choose soft targets where they know large numbers of people will be congregating.”

Concert organizer Barracuda Music said it canceled the three-night Eras Tour run , scheduled to begin Thursday, because the arrests were too close to showtime.

Heartbroken Swifties consoled each other on social media and in the streets of Vienna. After traveling from across the globe, hundreds gathered on Corneliusgasse, a small street just 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the stadium whose name echoes that of “Cornelia Street,” a contemplative synth-pop track from Swift’s 2019 album, “Lover.”

They sang Swift’s top hits, took selfies and traded friendship bracelets hanging from the branches of the only tree on the street. Swift fans often swap the beaded bracelets, typically bearing Swift’s song titles or popular phrases, with strangers at her concerts.

READ MORE: Who is Clara Bow from Taylor Swift’s new album?

Huiyeon Kim, 22, took a 14-hour flight from South Korea to Vienna for the concert. On Friday, she was among some 300 fans spending the day on Corneliusgasse. She called the cancellation “so disappointing.”

“We couldn’t understand or believe it,” she told AP. “I think it was very very sad.”

Meanwhile, younger fans and their parents traveled to the Vienna zoo for sightseeing — and discovered references to Swift’s songs among souvenirs in the gift shop, photos posted to social media show.

The lyric “Karma is a cat” — written in paper banners designed like friendship bracelets, of course — was nestled among stuffed felines, quoting “Karma” off the 2022 album “Midnights.”

Even as the fans belted out her hits, the superstar has not spoken publicly about the plot or canceled shows. “Taylor Nation,” a verified Instagram page widely believed to be run by her team, reposted the announcement from Barracuda Music, while her main account has not posted anything.

A representative for Swift did not respond to AP’s multiple requests for comment this week.

Last month, when a suspect in England killed three girls and wounded 10 people in a knife attack during a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class, the performer said she was ”completely in shock” over the violence.

Dazio reported from Berlin. Associated Press writers Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin; Maria Sherman in New York; Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland; Danica Kirka in London; and David Klepper and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

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New details emerge on Vienna terror plots behind Taylor Swift concert cancellations

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Tour Tickets? Swifties Crave a Presidential Endorsement.

Taylor Swift’s coveted support went to President Biden in 2020. A shadowy figure in an Instagram photo led some fans to make the leap that she will champion Kamala Harris.

By Julia Jacobs

Are they just seeing things, or does that silhouette of a Taylor Swift backup dancer resemble Vice President Kamala Harris?

The internet army of Swift fans often treats decoding the pop star’s Easter eggs as a part-time job, so speculation spread when some suggested that a photo Ms. Swift had posted to Instagram from her Eras Tour, which has been crisscrossing Europe this summer, could be a hint at support for a certain presidential ticket.

And yet, there has been no endorsement from Ms. Swift, who has increasingly thrown her outsize influence behind progressive politics. In October 2020, her pronouncement of support for Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not leave anything up for interpretation .

The photo in question, which Ms. Swift included in a post about her recent concerts in Warsaw, aligns with a standard transition from the tour in which her backup dancers — wearing pantsuits not unlike the kind that Ms. Harris happens to favor — strut offstage between songs.

Despite the counterarguments, some Swifties were convinced that the post was a coded message. A liberal segment of the fandom is eager for the singer to make her allegiances known, and the leap underscores Ms. Swift’s power as someone who can influence electoral politics in a single social media post. (In 2023, one Instagram post of hers led to 35,000 new voter registrations .)

A representative for Ms. Swift did not immediately respond to a question about the fandom’s reaction to the singer’s post.

Ms. Swift’s Democratic leanings and her supercharged cultural prominence on N.F.L. broadcasts last season have irritated supporters of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, some of whom have pushed conspiracy theories that her presence was meant to boost President Biden’s now-scrambled re-election. Ms. Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, named Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota her running mate on Tuesday.

The chatter about Ms. Swift’s recent Instagram post revived debate over the role of a pop star in politics.

“If we’re going to pay that much money as consumers, you don’t need to serve up politics for that,” Harris Faulkner, the Fox News host, said on television after the speculation about the concert photo swept the internet. “When people pay to see you, just perform.”

The Eras Tour has been on its major European leg this summer. On Wednesday, three concerts in Vienna were canceled after Austrian officials announced the arrests of two men whom they accused of plotting a terrorist attack, saying that one of them had focused on several stadium shows Ms. Swift had planned for this week.

Ms. Swift had begun to openly flex her electoral influence toward November’s election — but not toward any specific candidate. In March, when Mr. Biden was still at the top of the ticket, Ms. Swift encouraged her millions of Instagram followers to make a plan to vote in the presidential primaries, in a nonpartisan message that urged fans to “vote the people who most represent YOU into power.”

Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times. More about Julia Jacobs