Yale University will be teaching a course centering Beyoncé.
NBC News reports the university will be offering a course titled, “Beyonce Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music.”
Provided for the 2025 spring semester, it will be taught by Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American Studies and music who also leads Yale’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, a 320 York Humanities Initiative. An official release from the university states that students will examine the time period between 2013 and 2024 to look into the singer’s works, with the goal “to study Black history, intellectual thought, and performance.”
“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 said, according to NBC News.
The course will also draw inspiration from a former course Brooks taught while serving as a faculty member in Princeton University’s English and African American Studies departments.
“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks explained in the university news release. “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.”
Students can expect to take a dive into the “Cowboy Carter” artist’s visual albums, examine archives from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and make a playlist that ties to Beyoncé’s work, among others. They will also study scholars including Hortense Spillers and the Combahee River Collective.
“[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,” Brooks said, per the release. “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.”
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, this is one of several courses that have spotlighted Beyoncé over the years. Courses on her and her music have also been taught at Cornell University, Arizona State University, and Rutgers University, among others.
