Paula Harper Interview Featured in UChicago Magazine

Paula Harper

 

Paula Harper, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and The College, was recently interviewed in UChicago Magazine about her Taylor Swift scholarship. Co-editor of Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans (Routledge, 2025), Harper is currently at work on a book titled Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms.

Read an excerpt of the interview below, and read the full article on UChicago Magazine's website. 

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How did the book on Taylor Swift come together?

It happened in many stages. But in the first germination (which took place right around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), it came out of thinking about this strange kind of absence: There had been a bunch of scholarship on Beyoncé and other female pop stars, including Lady Gaga. But at that point there wasn’t a lot of academic writing on Taylor Swift at all. So Christa Anne Bentley, Kate Galloway, and I organized a conference, and then we proposed and edited the book together.

As we were brainstorming for the conference, we were thinking, “Who do we want to have in this conversation?” We knew we wanted music scholars, in part because a lot of the discourse around Taylor Swift focuses on her lyrics—but we didn’t want to entirely cede the territory to the English department. She’s a pop star, right? What is the music doing? We wanted some fandom studies people. This was also the era of the Taylor’s Version rerecordings, so we wanted to think about music and copyright. The list just kept growing.

That experience really helped us find the way we wanted to frame or use Taylor Swift as a figure to think about the state of 21st-century popular music, digital culture, global culture, and global capitalism.

Do you consider yourself a Taylor Swift fan, and if so, how do you balance your identities as a fan and as a scholar?

I prefer to be called a Swift scholar rather than a Swiftie. I do not have the level of encyclopedic, detailed knowledge that many people who enthusiastically call themselves Swifties have, and I don’t want any Swiftie stolen valor, basically.

People in positions like mine get asked about this a lot, how to separate or combine or navigate the distance between fandom and scholarship. And I think the reason I’m an academic is because I enjoy critical close reading. The way that I relate pleasurefully to texts is through close reading and diving deep on their history and context. So I don’t have a separate methodology for the things that I study and the things that I’m a fan of, nor do I put them in separate bins. There’s always a bit of cross-pollination—there’s always a potential that a thing I’m really fascinated by is going to become a subject of scholarship or that a subject of scholarship is going to leave traces in my life.

Click here to read the full article on UChicago Magazine's website.