Yale University will teach a course about Beyonce‘s political and cultural impact next spring.
The pop superstar, who topped the 2025 Grammy nominations list with 11 nods last week, will be the centerpiece of a new course offered by the humanities and arts department, focusing on her work from her 2013 self-titled album to her most recent release, “Cowboy Carter.”
Titled “Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music,” the class will be taught by writer and Black studies scholar Daphne Brooks — the co-founder of the Ivy League school’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group.
Shutterstock; Getty
The course will look at Beyoncé’s political and cultural impact. (Shutterstock; Getty)
According to Brooks, whose organization is composed of faculty and students working to “explore the untapped variety of black sound archives” on the New Haven, Connecticut campus, the course has been in the works for years.
She told NBC News: “I’m looking forward to exploring her body of work and considering how, among other things, historical memory, black feminist politics, black liberation politics and philosophies course through the last decade of her performance repertoire as well as the ways that her unprecedented experimentations with the album form, itself, have provided her with the platform to mobilize these themes.”
Brooks previously taught the “Black Women And Popular Music Culture” class at Princeton University and is the author of “Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910.”
Beyonce, 43, is no stranger to being the subject of college courses. Rutgers University, California Polytechnic State University and the University of Texas at San Antonio are among the schools that have introduced classes themed after the record-breaking Grammy winner.
