Queen Bey on the syllabus

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When Daphne Brooks planned a course about the pop star Beyoncé (left) for the spring semester, she didn’t think it was that noteworthy. “She’s been in my course curriculum in popular music studies since 2008,” says Brooks, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music. But after the Yale Daily News published an article about the course in November, it became international news, sparking “two weeks of constant media inquiries,” she says. The coverage suggested it was novel—and, some implied, trivial—to study someone from the realm of pop celebrity, but Brooks, who recently wrote a book about how Black women have shaped the intellectual conversation about music, disagrees on both counts.

“Pop music studies is at least half a century old,” she says. “We have academic journals and international conferences.” As for Beyoncé, Brooks says the singer took “a significant pivot in terms of intellectual provocations” in 2013, incorporating feminism and Black history into her work. As the course description puts it, “In short, this is a class that traces the relationship between Beyoncé’s artistic genius and Black intellectual practice.” Students are interested: Brooks says she had to put a cap on enrollment to keep to the mid-size lecture class format she has planned.