Harry’s House now has a classroom: The spring 2023 semester at Texas State University features a course devoted to Harry Styles.
As MySanAntonio.com reports, the class, called “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture,” filled up just two minutes after registration went live. But it’s not like the students sit around all day watching the video for “As It Was.”
“It’s not just that we’re going to study Harry Styles and nothing else,” associate professor Louie Dean Valencia told the news site. “In the same way you could probably learn about The Beatles to understand the 1960s, you could study Harry Styles to learn about the world today.”
Valencia, a historian, decided to write a book about Harry during the lockdown in 2020, which led to him developing the class concept. Valencia thinks it’s important for the course to focus on recent history.
“A lot of times … [students] don’t know what actually happened in 2010,” the year One Direction formed, Valencia notes. “This gives them the opportunity to have a better idea of what was happening … that they maybe weren’t paying attention to, but … anchoring in subjects that are interesting to them, that they can actually relate to what was going on at the time in their own life.”
The first week of the course began with a discussion of the history of rock music and how Harry is following in the footsteps of icons like David Bowie, Prince and Elvis Presley. At the end of a semester, the students will release a podcast series.
- The Harry class isn’t the only pop-culture-based class at Texas State, either: courses about baseball, hip-hop culture and video games are also offered.
Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
