Yale University Offers Course On Beyoncé’s Cultural Impact

In Spring 2025, Yale University will offer a course examining Beyoncé’s cultural impact. The course’s professor views the course as an appropriate response to the recent US election.

What’s the buzz: Beginning next spring, Yale University will offer a course examining Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s cultural impact in America over the past two decades. Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American Studies and music, will use Beyoncé’s works released between 2013 and 2024 as a vehicle with which to look at Black cultural history. In the course, “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music,” students will look at interdisciplinary works of Black cultural thought and grassroots activism over the past few hundred years.

Digging deeper: Yale isn’t the first university to focus a course on a pop star. UC Berkeley, Harvard University and Queen’s Law School in Canada have all focused courses around Taylor Swift’s impact, and The University of Southern California once offered a sociology course centered on Lady Gaga.

Following the recent US election, Daphne Brooks believes in the importance of recognizing Beyoncé’s cultural impact more than ever. Brooks cites Beyoncé’s number of breakthroughs, engagements with Black cultural life through her aesthetics, and her interweaving of history and politics into her art as hallmarks of the star’s output.

Sounds like those Ivy-leaguers are in for a treat.

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Sara Schabas

Sara Schabas is a Dora-nominated soprano, writer and yoga teacher. She has performed and created leading roles with companies including Vancouver Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, the Dayton Opera, and Aspen Opera, and is a former member of Barbara Hannigan’s Equilibrium Young Artists. Currently based in Montreal, she is a doctoral student at McGill University — where she recently received the Wirth Vocal Prize — and editor of Art Song Canada magazine.