Yale offering course on Beyoncé’s cultural impact in spring 2025
Students at Yale, let’s get in formation.
Student members of the Beyhive will be happy to learn that Yale is offering a course on Beyoncé’s cultural impact coming in spring 2025.
The course, officially titled “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music,” will be led by professor Daphne Brooks, who teaches African American Studies and music.
The school paper said the course was inspired by a course Brooks previously taught at Princeton University, called “Black Women in Popular Music Culture.”
“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks told Yale Daily News. “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.”
Brooks said in the wake of Beyoncé’s involvement in the 2024 election and the events that preceded it, now is the perfect time to delve into her impact on American culture, pop culture and her global 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.”
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The class will focus on Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled album through her latest work, “Cowboy Carter,” and the impacts and influences of those bodies of work, according to Yale Daily News.
Students will also participate in screenings of the star’s visual albums, and study the literary works of Hortense Spillers, the Combahee River Collective, Cedric Robinson and Karl Hagstrom Miller.
Brooks said there’s a reason her course will start at 2013, though the star had popular hits in the years prior.
“2013 was really such a watershed moment in which she articulated her beliefs in Black feminism. [“Flawless”] was the first time a pop artist had used sound bites from a Black feminist like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” Brooks said. “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.”
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