Students at Yale University will soon be given the opportunity to take an Ivy League deep-dive into the impact of Beyoncé, whose Cowboy Carter just bagged 11 Grammy nominations.
In a recent Yale News piece, Professor Daphne Brooks was quoted as saying the course is timely due to the 32-time Grammy winner currently being “just so ripe for teaching.” Per Brooks, who previously taught a broader course at Princeton that touched on Beyoncé’s work, prospective enrollees can expect to take an educational journey through Bey’s work stretching from 2013, the year she released her “Drunk in Love”-featuring self-titled album, through the present Cowboy Carter era.
Visual album screenings, discussions on complementary works from various scholars, playlist crafting with the goal of linking key Bey discography moments to her predecessors, and more will all be part of the headlines-ready course.
“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,” Brooks said.
Read Olivia Cyrus’ full piece on the 2025 “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music” course here.
The course does indeed come at an ideal time, as the Texas-born artist, who also has an Oscar nomination to her name, is presently poised to further solidify her standing as the winningest artist in Recording Academy history. Among Cowboy Carter’s 11 nominations for the 2025 ceremony is Album of the Year, which sees her going up against other ubiquitous releases from the year, Charli XCX’s Brat and Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess among them. In the Best Country Album category, Bey is up against her “Levii’s Jeans” collaborator Post Malone, whose F-1 Trillion album—featuring Hardy, Sierra Ferrell, Morgan Wallen, and more—earned him seven total nominations.
