In person lecture also will be live-streamed on YouTube
Stephanie Burt, a Harvard University professor and poetry
expert—and a “Swiftie”—has examined in her course “Taylor Swift and Her World”
the award-winning singer’s unique, joyful genius as an artist who has mastered
her craft. Burt will further discuss Swift’s artistry and celebrity during the
University of Rhode Island’s Humanities
and Popular Culture/Counterculture lecture series.
Burt’s talk, titled “The
Genius of Taylor Swift: A Crash Course on the Pop Superstar,” will be
held Thursday, March 26, at 4 p.m. in the Hope Room of the
Robert J. Higgins Welcome Center, 45 Upper College Road on the Kingston Campus.
The yearlong lecture series, hosted by the URI Center for the Humanities, is
focusing on topics ranging from women’s basketball to Shakespeare to music and
social justice. The series is co-sponsored by the URI College of Arts and
Sciences, Division of Research and Economic Development, Department of Gender
and Women’s Studies and the Affirming Multivocal Humanities Mellon Grant, and
Department of Philosophy.
Burt’s presentation, part of URI’s annual Spring Humanities
Festival, will also be livestreamed through the Center for the
Humanities’ YouTube
channel, and people who register will receive a link. At the March 26 talk,
Burt will analyze Swift, her body of work and the community that her art has
fostered.
Along with her teaching work at Harvard, Burt has published nine books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection “Close Calls with Nonsense” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer and the Boston Review.
Following her talk, Burt will sign copies of her latest
work, “Taylor’s Version,” which shows what Swift has created, how it
works and why her songs will endure.
The Center for the Humanities also invites URI’s Swifties to
come early to make a friendship bracelet. Beginning at 3:15 p.m. URI students
will operate a friendship bracelet-making station—the bracelets are frequently
exchanged by fans at Swift’s concerts. In addition, two University students
will be presented with the Center for the Humanities’ annual Student Excellence
Awards by Jason Dwyer, professor of chemistry and associate dean for research
and graduate studies in URI’s College
of Arts and Sciences.
Claire McCullough, a senior majoring in French, will receive
the undergraduate award, while Molly McDonagh, a graduate student majoring in
history, will be presented with the graduate award.
McCullough, a 2025 College of Arts and Sciences summer
research fellow from Warren, is the descendant of some of the last speakers of
Mississippi Gulf Coast French and used her summer fellowship to interview
speakers of this little-researched dialect. She is compiling the interviews
into an oral history project that she hopes to make available to the public as
a valuable resource for researchers.
Research interests for McDonagh— from Philadelphia who was a
Ryan Scholar during her undergraduate years at URI—have ranged from tattoo
culture in 1970s Rhode Island to the Black Death in Medieval Europe. She has
also been a participant in archaeological field schools in Belize, Bulgaria,
and Rhode Island and a student assistant at the University Archives and Special
Collections.
Burt’s talk will be followed by a discussion on
Shakespeare by Jeffrey Wilson, a Shakespeare scholar at Harvard and
editor-in-chief of the journal Public Humanities, on Thursday,
April 23, concluding this academic year’s lecture series.
The annual signature yearlong lecture series, hosted by
the University’s Center for the Humanities, is free and open to the public. A
digital archive of last year’s lecture series can be found on the
humanities center’s website. For more information on the series,
email uri.humanities@gmail.com.