Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans

From studio albums to stadium tours, Taylor Swift is a record-setting pop artist whose impacts are outsized and global in scale. At the same time, she has cultivated an audience base that finds her, her songs, and her voice eminently relatable. Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans positions Swift as a prismatic figure for the musical world of the 21st century.

This collection includes new work from interdisciplinary scholars who focus on Swift’s star persona; the lyrics, themes, and meanings of Swift’s songs; and the ways that fans interact with Swift’s work and with each other. Together, the essays evaluate Swift’s career with attention to how her work has resonated in a changing global society, how she has navigated shifts in the music industry, and how she has negotiated changes in her musical transition from country to pop along the lines of her age, gender, race, and class identity.

Including contributions by scholars, practitioners, and journalists, this book offers a serious consideration of one of today’s most popular music stars that shows why and how she matters. Engaging a wide variety of disciplines and methodological perspectives―including fan studies, cultural studies, philosophy, musicology and music theory, journalism, and songwriting―Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans will be of interest to students and scholars of music, media studies, popular culture, fan studies, gender and sexuality studies, and sound studies.

Christa Anne Bentley is a musicologist who studies the intersections of folk and popular song through the singer-songwriter movement. She is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas.

Kate Galloway is Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research addresses how and why contemporary artists remix and recycle sounds, music, and texts encoded with environmental knowledge and the creative and social phenomena of internet music communities and practices of listening to the internet.

Paula Clare Harper researches music, sound, and the internet. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.