In spring 2025, Yale University will offer a course called Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music.
Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies, will teach students about Queen Bey’s contributions and their cultural impact.
“[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,” Brooks said, the Yale Daily News reported. “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.”
According to the outlet, Brooks will focus on Beyoncé’s contribution to American culture, based on a previous course she taught at Princeton University.
“Those classes were always overenrolled,” Brooks said. “And there was so much energy around the focus on Beyoncé, even though it was a class that starts in the late 19th century and moves through the present day. I always thought I should come back to focusing on her and centering her work pedagogically at some point.”
Additionally, Yale students will study readings by Hortense Spillers, the Combahee River Collective, Cedric Robinson and Karl Hagstrom Miller.
The syllabus coursework includes Beyoncé’s visual albums, working with archives in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It also includes public humanities projects examining Beyoncé’s physical impact on Black people. Furthermore, students will also create playlists connecting Beyoncé’s music with those of her influences.
The course will focus on Beyoncé’s later releases, such as Lemonade, Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, because Brooks said this was when she broke away from “typical pop repertoire.”
“2013 was really such a watershed moment in which she articulated her beliefs in Black feminism,” Brooks said. “[In “Flawless”], it was the first time a pop artist had used sound bites from a Black feminist like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It became more about ‘We are going to produce club bangers that are also galvanizing our ability to think radically about the state of liberation.”
