A lecturer at Texas State University has been making waves online after announcing his new college course all about Harry Styles.
The course, perhaps a real Sign of the Times, will focus on the culture of celebrity and will teach students hard skills they can use such as ‘how to manage a social media campaign.’
Harry Styles College Course
Louie Dean Valencia, a professor of digital history, announced the news online that his course, ‘Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture,’ had been approved for the spring of 2023.
No Daydreaming in this class
Students will be taught about Styles and popular European culture to understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity ‘as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture, and consumerism.’
The course began with a 23-page proposal to the honours college dean in 2021 written by Valencia, and seven months later, it has been officially approved. The news has been met with thousands of likes and retweets online, and Valencia is ‘flabbergasted’ by the response, he told NPR.
One Direction fans are also in for a treat, as the course will examine the group’s albums, as well as Styles’ solo work, in order. As a Styles mega-stan, Valencia would love for students to leave the class ‘feeling a fraction of the self-love that many of Harry’s fans have when they leave his concerts.’
How will students be graded? As well as a participation grade, those on the course will complete a podcast and will be assessed on elements such as research, scripting, audio editing, and peer review.
A Golden opportunity
‘I think a class like this has a benefit of really exploring what changes have happened over the last 12 years and helps put that in context for students in a way that complements other classes in history departments that kind of give those other perspectives that maybe are in the distant past or larger periods of time,’ Valencia said.
Students will also learn how to evaluate sources, test veracity, learn visual and auditory analysis, writing and editing skills, and learn technical skills such as audio editing. Valencia explained on his Twitter page that these skills are important if you want to go into law, media production, or if you want to work in a museum.
When asked by a Twitter user if Styles had approved of a course on his ‘private life’ being taught, Valencia made it clear that they will not focus on his private life, ‘only his art and public activism and the film, literature, philosophy, music he has acknowledged as influential.’
Valencia said it will be similar to the way we study the works of Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, ‘or any great artist.’