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Yale University offers new course on Beyonce's 'boundary-transgressing' cultural impact

"[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time," Brooks said. "The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetics and her utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her."

The course is a byproduct of Brooks’ previous course, "Black Women in Popular Music Culture" which she taught at Princeton University. Brooks suggested connecting the course to Beyoncé seemed natural.

"Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music" will be taught next semester.  (Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

"Those classes were always overenrolled," Brooks said. "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."

It continued, "Its aim is two-fold: to both explore and analyze the dense, robust and virtuosic aesthetics, socio-historical and political dimensions of Beyonce’s pathbreaking, mid-career body of work and to, likewise, use her aesthetics; the multi-dimensional form and content of her recordings; her boundary-transgressing performance politics; her history-making visual albums; her innovative concert films; her unprecedented pop music archival endeavors and more as the occasion to explore landmark Black Studies scholarship and Black freedom struggle scholarly and cultural texts (in history, Black feminist theory, philosophy, anthropology, art history, performance studies, musicology, political science, sociology, dance, American Studies, religious studies, archival studies etc.) that directly resonate with Beyonce’s sonic, visual and live performance endeavors. In short, this is a class that traces the relationship between Beyonce’s artistic genius and Black intellectual practice."

A Yale Bulldogs flag waves in the wind during the Ivy League Tournament championship college lacrosse game between the Pennsylvania Quakers and the Yale Bulldogs on May 8, 2022, at Stevenson-Pincince Field in Providence, RI.  (Photo by Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Brooks emphasized the importance of the course considering recent politics. 

"2013 was really such a watershed moment in which she articulated her beliefs in Black feminism," Brooks said. "[In Flawless], it was the first time a pop artist had used sound bites from a Black feminist like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It became more about ‘We are going to produce club bangers that are also galvanizing our ability to think radically about the state of liberation.’"

She added, "Other artists have not [embraced] intersectional political and historical work like Beyoncé has. And that’s not to pit them against each other; it’s just to make a point about what institutions choose to value and what they often disregard, and it’s often people of color and especially women of color’s artistic achievements. So that’s why this class needed to happen right now."

Beyoncé is among many celebrities who have been subjects for college courses. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Taylor Swift courses were also available at Harvard University and New York University's Clive Davis Institute.