Beyoncé is known for "Schoolin' Life," and now her life as an entertainer is the subject of a new course at one Ivy League university.
Starting in the spring of 2025, Yale University will offer a class focused on her cultural impact.
The class is titled: Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music.
Students taking the class will "examine Beyoncé’s artistic work from 2013 to 2024 as a lens to study Black history, intellectual thought and performance," according to the Yale Daily News. The course will begin with the 32-time Grammy winner's surprise release of her 2013 self-titled album and follow her career to the present day.
The class will be taught by African American Studies Professor Daphne Brooks, who also taught a similar course at Princeton called “Black Women in Popular Music Culture.” In her Princeton course, Brooks does have a section on the "Crazy In Love" singer's cultural impact. She'll draw from that for her class at Yale.
“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks told the university's news outlet. “And there was so much energy around the focus on Beyoncé, even though it was a class that starts in the late 19th century and moves through the present day. I always thought I should come back to focusing on her and centering her work pedagogically at some point.”
This course is the latest in a string of college classes to take on pop-culture-inspired themes. Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the University of Florida have offered classes based on Taylor Swift's influence.