Yale to Offer Beyoncé College Course Studying ‘Black History, Intellectual Thought & Performance’
Entertainment
The class is just the latest university offering to be dedicated to the superstar.
Beyonc performs onstage during the “RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR” at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Aug. 11, 2023 in Atlanta.
Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood
Beyoncé is adding another ivy to her life. Next year, Yale University will offer a collegiate course studying the multi-hyphenate superstar’s career as it relates to a greater history of Black excellence in art, spanning her 2013 solo debut to 2024’s Cowboy Carter.
Registered as “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics through Music,” the spring 2025 class will be taught by Professor Daphne Brooks. As reported by the Yale Daily News Friday (Nov. 8), it’ll focus on the “sonic, fashion and visual media” evolution of Bey — who is mom to eldest daughter Blue Ivy (along with twins Rumi and Sir) and founder of Ivy Park — over the past decade. According to Yale’s course description, “In short, this is a class that traces the relationship between Beyonce’s artistic genius and Black intellectual practice.”
“[Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,” Brooks told the student publication. “The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetics and her utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her.”
Trending on Billboard
Through examining the 32-time Grammy winner’s career, students will also gain insight into “Black history, intellectual thought and performance” at large, with Bey serving as a jumping-off point for wider discussions on icons such as Josephine Baker, Diana Ross, Betty Davis and Grace Jones. Brooks previously incorporated Beyoncé into her “Black Women in Popular Music Culture” curriculum when the professor was teaching at Princeton, which inspired her to devote an entire class to the star as past students showed “so much energy” around Bey in particular.
The Yale offering is just the latest Beyoncé course to be unveiled at a prestigious university in recent years, part of a broader trend of colleges all over the world dedicating classes to modern artists. A notable uptick in Bey-related studies happened in 2016, around when she released her critically acclaimed album Lemonade; since then, Arizona State, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Texas at San Antonio, the University of Michigan and more institutions have all enshrined Queen Bey in academia in some way or another.
News about the latest Beyoncé class arrived on the same day as the 2025 Grammy nominations, which saw the Destiny’s Child alum earn more nods than any other artist. Among her 11 nominations are song and record of the year for Billboard Hot 100-topper “Texas Hold ‘Em” and album of the year for Cowboy Carter.
Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox
Sign Up