The Story Behind TayTalks

TayTalks stems from the fandom and scholarship of Dr. Jennifer Smith, professor and chair of English at North Central. We talked to her about how the idea developed for the College to host a celebration and discussion around Taylor Swift as a cultural, artistic, political, and economic force — examining her work and influence through the lens of the liberal arts.

Q: How did your scholarly background and love for Taylor Swift first intersect?

A: As an English professor, I have long been interested in and impressed by Taylor Swift’s storytelling, but I didn’t become a “Swiftie” until I went to the Reputation tour on Sept. 15, 2018. After that show and experience, I was all in, listening to the music on repeat, reading the fan theories, and just generally bopping to each album. Then, with the release of the “sister albums” Folklore and Evermore in 2020, my fandom shifted to something more scholarly. These albums are so very deeply indebted to writers and books that I became invested in her engagement with literature. 

In 2020, my interests were scholarly, but they were also deeply personal. My kids were 2 and 5, I had moved my family here for this job, and at times the work seemed insurmountable. During the pandemic, there were days, weeks even, when teaching — what I loved most — lost its luster. On one of the darkest days, I stood in my kitchen, computer open trying to answer emails, while my youngest rammed into my leg over and over. I felt tears fall to my cheeks, and the song playing was “This is Me Trying.” 

One reason that Taylor Swift has a popularity few others have enjoyed (and over such a long period) is that she takes the inner lives of girls and women seriously. She thinks we are worth writing about in a world where too few do. 

Q: Can you talk about how this field of study has grown, including your experience at the Swiftposium in Melbourne, Australia, last February and the presentation you gave there?

A: To my knowledge, there have now been three international conferences dedicated to Swift-studies, a roster of scholarly journal articles and edited collections are in press or published, and dozens of universities now offer courses on her, including institutions like Harvard, NYU and UC Berkeley. Scholars from every field are studying her influence and art. The Swiftposium in Melbourne received over 400 submissions; they accepted 130 presenters from 78 academic institutions and 60 disciplines. It was an incredible celebration of inquiry around a subject that fascinates so many. I met scholars from across the world who are teaching and researching on how she is changing the landscape of marketing, legal studies, publishing, and sports culture, to name just a few. 

My presentation — which is part of a longer essay that will appear in the forthcoming book The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality — began from that moment in my kitchen. In this presentation, I explore how Folklore and Evermore embrace the alienation, ambiguity and irony that saturate modernist literature, especially in those works she alludes to, including The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the poetry of Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings. I argue that modernist literature provides a productive set of references for Swift because our current moment has so much in common with the sea changes of the early twentieth century.  

Q: How did that event inspire you to bring similar discussions to campus and what is your vision for TayTalks?

A: In addition to our teaching and research, faculty attend a lot of meetings. Last spring, I was in one such meeting and we were discussing how we get students and families to understand what we mean when we talk about “the liberal arts,” and it struck me that the Swiftposium had been a three-day celebration of the liberal arts. No one used those words, but that is what it was. We analyzed Swift using English, history, art, music, economics, gender studies, political science, language study, philosophy, and so much more. 

So, in that meeting, I did the thing you are not supposed to do: I opened my computer and sent an email to my dean, Stephen Maynard Caliendo, pitching the idea. Three minutes later, his response came: “YES!!!!!!!! I'll help.”

Dean Caliendo was on board because he knows that the liberal arts prepare students to live rich and varied lives and to think and create jobs that don’t even exist today. They introduce ways of thinking that will sustain our students professionally and personally for a lifetime.

NC enjoys such an embarrassment of intellectual talent amongst its faculty, and Dean Caliendo and I knew that if we put out the call, they would deliver. And, wow, they have.  

Q: What do you hope students take away from attending TayTalks?

A: Students can expect to learn about Taylor Swift’s exercise regimen from experts in physical therapy, they can learn about her effect on the NFL from a scholar in sports management, they will learn to navigate disinformation and online trolls from a research librarian, they will examine the gender dimensions of her work from a professor in business and then from a scholar of political science and gender studies, and they will engage with deep questions on the nature of truth, regret and beauty with a philosopher, a physicist, and a mathematician, respectively.

I hope members of the community and our students take away the idea that learning can be both fun and joyful. They will be taking away friendship bracelets, for sure. 

Q: Why do you think discussions like TayTalks are important to have at North Central?

A: Three and a half years ago, alone in my kitchen, I had no idea if I would ever again gather with hundreds of people and just talk. We should take every opportunity to do so. We need music to make meaning in and from our lives, we need words to articulate our inner lives, and we need each other for community. By learning to hold many ideas at once about a subject like Swift, we are actually practicing the habits of mind that sustain our individual and collective lives. North Central is committed to this work. We can be smart, we can be passionate, and we can do it in sequins. 

Q: What’s your favorite Taylor Swift song and why?

A: So many, but “Marjorie” has my heart: “Never be so kind, you forget to be clever/ Never be so clever, you forget to be kind.”