The “Golden” singer is the subject of a new course at Texas State University Honors College.
Louie Dean Valencia, a professor of digital history and a longtime Styles fan, announced on Twitter over the weekend that the university’s honors college had approved his course, “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture,” for the spring of 2023.
According to the class flyer, the honor’s college course will focus on Styles’ music, along with “the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture, and consumerism.”
This is not the first time a pop star will be the topic of a college-level course.
This past February, New York University offered a course on Taylor Swift, while in 2010 the University of South Carolina offered a course on Lady Gaga. In 2011, Georgetown University had a course that focused on Jay-Z lyrics; in 2014 there was a Miley Cyrus course at Skidmore College. Other courses have covered artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Sean Combs, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Kanye West, and even Michael Jackson.
The college course will focus on Harry’s work, including albums, films, and the former band One Direction, according to NBC New York.
The inspiration behind the class came from research Valencia worked on during the COVID lockdown in the summer of 2020.
“When I couldn’t travel to do my regular research, I started researching Harry — focusing on his art, the ways masculinity has changed in the last decade, celebrity culture, and the internet,” the professor told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.
Registration for the class begins this fall
