Music for the college classroom: A school in Texas will soon offer a Harry Styles class

A new college history course at Texas State University will focus on Harry Styles and celebrity culture. Starting next spring, around 20 lucky students will be able to learn how – as the famous pop star put it – “it’s not the same as it was”.

Louie Dean Valencia, professor of digital history and longtime Styles fan, announced on Twitter over the weekend, the university’s honors college approved his course Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture for spring 2023.

That post has since racked up more than 10,000 likes, inspired media coverage around the world and prompted what Valencia estimates are hundreds of messages.

“If anything, the fact that this course has gotten so much global attention means that I might know *something* about how celebrity culture works,” he later tweeted. “I want students to learn not only about modern history, but hard skills they can use! Like how to run a social media campaign!”

A course leaflet says it will focus on styles and popular European culture to better understand the cultural and political development of contemporary celebrity, covering a range of topics including gender and sexuality, internet culture, media, class and consumerism. Students will practice evaluating sources, sharpen their visual and auditory analysis, and learn technical skills such as audio editing as they work toward their final project, a podcast.

Valencia’s own work focuses mostly on countercultures, specifically fascist and anti-fascist youth cultures in 20th-century Europe. But he had to put his research on hold – the latest, a comparative history of HIV/AIDS in European cities – when the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Valencia tells NPR in a phone interview that he’s started two new projects during his 2020 summer shut down: learning to play electric guitar and writing a book about how the world has changed in the last decade through the lens of Styles. Two years later, he has made measurable progress.

“As my guitar instructor would happily say, if you record me and then speed it up twice, it almost sounds like a normal song,” Valencia says, laughing. “As for the book, it is very close to completion.”

He ends the book with a chapter comparing the stages and experiences of various Styles concerts, and he still has several more on his calendar – one in Madrid next week, three in Austin in the fall. Additionally, Valencia says that he may have to add another chapter for the events of the last week, adding that it “might get a little meta at the end.”

The research Valencia did for his book—as well as his personal penchant for One Direction and Styles—helped shape the direction (no pun intended) of the class. But as he explains, the process of planning, developing and getting approval wasn’t exactly easy.

He hatched and developed the idea during the pandemic

Valencia is eager to talk about his own love of Styles’ music and the role it plays in his personal and professional life.

He was working on his Ph.D. from 2010 to 2016, the exact years One Direction were active (not to mention a worldwide sensation). As a historian of fascism who often works with dark material, Valencia says he appreciated the group’s uplifting music and the upbeat atmosphere of its concerts. Valencia then took a one-year teaching position at Harvard in 2017 — just as Styles’ solo career was taking off.

“While I’ve been putting my feet up, seeing him develop as an artist, as someone who wants to be taken seriously, maybe in a world that doesn’t always feel like it’s welcoming to you… I think when he came out as a solo artist, that particularly resonated with me in a lot of ways,” he recalls.

Valencia had been teaching at Texas State for several years when the pandemic hit. He first taught completely remotely and then in a masked, socially distanced classroom, which he says made it difficult to connect with students. He found that talking more openly and passionately about his own interests—namely, his appreciation of Stiles—at the beginning or end of class helped overcome those boundaries.

“When I was doing that, the students were discovering their own interests in music, sometimes overlapping with mine, and a lot of times we had really good conversations with the themes in his music,” he said, pointing to Styles’ performances and activism.

It’s not unprecedented for colleges to offer courses on contemporary music icons: several have created classes around Beyoncé, a University of South Carolina professor taught a sociology class on Lady Gaga, and New York University’s Clive Davis Institute recently introduced a class on Taylor Swift (who received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the university earlier this spring).

Valencia approached the dean of the honors college in the fall of 2021 with the idea for a class and wrote what ended up being a 23-page proposal over winter break. A lengthy process and seven months later the course is officially in the books.

Now, Valencia is hearing from dozens of people who are excited about the class. People of all ages want to sign up, some want to follow the discussions online, some even want him to include their fan poetry in the curriculum.

Valencia estimates he’s received nearly a thousand emails and messages in the past week and says he’s been “overwhelmed” by the positive response. In fact, between sending out media requests and tasting the messages, he failed to respond to them.

“I’m actually trying to think of how to answer all these questions in a way that shows as much love as people show in their messages,” he says. Or, as Stiles likes to say, treating people with kindness.

Students will study the historical record and create a podcast

The class is open to students in the university’s honors college, but is not limited to history majors.

High-interest classes typically select students through a lottery system, and Valencia modestly says he thinks that might be the case for this one.

Once students get their desired places, what exactly will they be studying for the next 15 weeks?

Valencia says that in order to stick to the facts, they’re only looking at things that Styles himself has posted publicly. These include his music, films and products, interviews, and the musical and literary influences he has discussed in the past, from Susan Sontag to Haruki Murakami and Alain de Botton.

The course will proceed primarily chronologically, with topics varying throughout the day. Of course, Valencia adds, he will look at One Direction’s and Styles’ solo albums in turn.

He says he’s especially excited to teach a history class that focuses on recent events, a relative rarity in the field. Plus, he notes, younger freshmen may not even remember some of the moments and trends the class will cover in its 12-year span.

“I think a class like this has the advantage of really exploring what changes have happened in the last 12 years and helps put that into context for students in a way that complements other classes in history departments that give those other perspectives that can would be in the distant past or larger periods of time,” Valencia says.

Students will talk about things like how Brexit has affected Styles’ tours and products, as well as social issues Styles has spoken about, including the Black Lives Matter movement and gun control.

Valencia says that in addition to the participation grade, students will be assessed as they complete the incremental parts of their podcast, such as research, script writing, audio editing and peer review.

He envisions the final product as a series of podcast episodes that are diverse enough to cover a range of topics, yet cohesive enough to be packaged as a single series and released online for a wider audience.

The class is limited to 20, at least for now

Valencia plans to meet with university officials to discuss some possible ways to meet the demand. He figures it will probably take him another six months to develop an online version of the class that people have already been asking about.

“I assumed no one wanted an online class again,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, plot twist!'”

In any case, he hopes to offer this class as many times as the university allows.

And to answer another question on everyone’s mind: No, Styles himself is not scheduled to make a guest appearance — at least not yet. Valencia says he would be happy about it, but doesn’t know how to get in touch with the star’s team.

Besides a celebrity guest star, what are his other dreams for the class? Valencia says he has a big one, though he admits it might sound kind of cute:

“I would love for the students to leave the class feeling a fraction of the self-infatuation that many of Harry’s fans feel when they leave his concerts,” he says. “And they also think that maybe now they have the tools to do something in the world.”

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