Brian Donovan, a 51-year-old sociology professor, offers an honors seminar called the Sociology of Taylor Swift at at the University of Kansas. The academic—and Swiftie—uses the musician as a vehicle to discuss topics across American life, including celebrity and fandom; race, gender, and sexuality; and the culture and creative industries. For Kansas Alumni magazine, Steven Hill shares Donovan’s insights on the importance of studying pop culture, and why a pivot during the COVID pandemic to study joy, happiness, and Swift’s life and career was an effective research move.
“Seeing strangers connect in a positive way—that’s always a good sign of the value of a given cultural phenomenon,” he says. “Anything that can move 55,000 people for good or ill is worthy of our attention.”
One fan Donovan interviewed through his TikTok outreach, a 30-something Swiftie with a high-pressure job, suddenly found herself stuck at home during the height of the pandemic. She noticed that another resident in her apartment building had a Taylor Swift doormat. She left the neighbor a note, and the women began texting, then talking—with masks, at a distance, in the hallway—before eventually getting together for an overnight listening party to celebrate the midnight release of one of Swift’s 2020 recordings. Three years later they’re attending together an event that seemed inconceivable during those dark days—an Eras Tour concert uniting thousands of thrilled fans—asking, for a few brief hours, nothing more than what we have always asked of our idols: joy and deliverance.
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