Yale University is set to offer a new course that will study and dissect Beyoncé‘s impact on culture.
African American Studies and music professor Daphne Brooks will teach “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music” in Spring 2025, wherein students will utilize Bey’s musical, fashion and visual works from 2013 to 2024 to study Black history, intellectual thought and performance, as well as the Black female experience in media and politics. The university’s independent student newspaper further confirmed that students will also take part in discussions that encompass readings from the likes of Hortense Spillers, the Combahee River Collective, Cedric Robinson and Karl Hagstrom Miller.
The class follows Professor Brooks’ previous “Black Women in Popular Music Culture ”class at Princeton University, with a good portion of her Yale course drawing from the section of her Princeton class about Beyoncé. “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.”
“[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,” she added. “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.”
