close
close

Mondor Festival

News with a Local Lens

    • Beyoncé course to be offered at Yale University
    minsta

    Beyoncé course to be offered at Yale University

    Pabio Posted on

    play

    Beyoncé Knowles-Carter this will not only remain in the history books; now, the record-breaking superstar and his legacy will be the subject of a new course at Yale University.

    The single-credit course titled “Beyoncé Makes History: Radical Black Tradition, Culture, Theory and Politics Through Music” will be offered at the Ivy League school next year.

    Taught by Daphne Brooks, professor of African American studies at the university, the course will examine the megastar’s profound cultural impact. In class, students will take a deep dive into Beyoncé’s career and examine how she sparked greater awareness and engagement in social and political doctrines.

    The class will use the singer’s extensive musical catalog, ranging from her 2013 self-titled album to her landmark album. “Cowboy Carter” as learning tools. Brooks also plans to use Beyoncé’s music as a vehicle to teach students about other notable black intellectuals throughout history, such as Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass.

    As fans know, Beyoncé, who is already the most awarded artist in Grammy history, recently made history again as most nominated artist with a total of 99, after receiving 11 more nominations at the 2025 Grammy Awards for his eighth studio album “Cowboy Carter.” She released the album on March 29 and has since made historymultiple broken recordings and put a huge projector about black country artists and the roots of the genre.

    “(This class) seemed good to teach because (Beyoncé) is so ripe to teach right now,” Brooks told the Yale Daily News. “The number of breakthroughs and innovations she has made and the way she interweaves history and politics and her very specific engagements with black cultural life in her performance aesthetic and her use of her voice as a portal for thinking about history and politics – there’s simply no one like his.”

    And this isn’t the first time that university professors have given courses centered on Beyoncé. There have actually been several.

    Riché Richardson, professor of African-American literature at Cornell University and the Africana Research Center, created a class called “Beyoncénation” to explore its impact on sectors such as fashion, music, business, social justice and motherhood.

    “Beyoncé had a profound impact on national womanhood,” Richardson told USA TODAY. “It’s interesting because traditionally, for black women, there’s a sense that they’ve had certain difficulties (and so) marriage and education have been seen as mutually exclusive.”

    And Erik Steinskog, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, also felt compelled to create a course on Beyoncé in 2017 that focused on race and gender.

    Steinskog examined the singer’s music and ideologies from an international perspective.

    “Then and still, I consider Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ to be one of the musical masterpieces of the 21st century,” he said. “I wanted to present black feminism to my students as a sort of contrast to the way feminism is often perceived in Europe.”

    Follow Caché McClay, USA TODAY Network’s Beyoncé Knowles-Carter reporter, on Instagram, TikTok And X as @cachemcclay.

    Pabio
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like