Students prompted image generators to create an album cover in a specific style like Cubism or Impressionism, building skills they plan to take into the workforce. (Clockwise from top left: Rob Seward, Lilly Woulfe, Sam Wagner)

In our literature era

Article by Megan M.F. Everhart Graphics courtesy of Elena Burton, Rob Seward, Dan Steenkamer, Sam Wagner and Lilly Woulfe | Photo illustrations by Jaynell Keely | Videos courtesy of Matt Kinservik and Rachel Lapp March 04, 2025

An innovative Winter Session course connects a pop icon with centuries-old literary traditions

Like millions of fans, Rachel Lapp was ecstatic when Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, in spring 2024. An instructional designer at the University of Delaware, Lapp dove into the album, analyzing lyrics and looking for connections to Swift’s life, and she realized that she wasn’t alone in exploring the album’s deeper meaning.

“So many people were doing high-quality literary analysis, but they weren’t teachers. They weren’t professors or anyone in a formal academic space. They were just fans who love Taylor Swift, who took the time to research. I thought that this was such a missed opportunity,” Lapp said.

The UD alumna knew one of her former professors would also be intrigued by what was happening among the singer’s fans, and she reached out to Matthew Kinservik to suggest that he could take advantage of the phenomenon to introduce people to classic literary analysis. Kinservik, a professor in the Department of English, specializes in 18th-century British literature.

“I had never listened to an entire Swift song,” he admitted, but he liked the idea and spent the summer attentively playing every album and song, taking notes on Swift's writing style, allusions and themes.

The result was a 2025 winter session English course, “Taylor Swift and/as Literature,” that combined pop music, 21st-century artificial intelligence, 16th-19th century British poetry and critical analysis.

The tortured professor

Kinservik and Lapp received an innovation grant to develop “Taylor Swift and/as Literature” for the 2025 Winter Session, which led to new experiences for the accomplished professor. It was the first time Kinservik taught an online, asynchronous course, which required crafting lectures and assignments in a different way. He also jumped into social media, hiring an undergraduate intern, Madison Shaffery, to help create “The Tortured Professors Department” to post short-form videos promoting the course and giving mini lessons.

The approach attracted a variety of students, including Swift fans, those looking to complete a breadth requirement, a self-described “major college sports guy,” UD staff members and a first-year graduate student in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program, Rob Seward, who learned about the course when one of Kinservik’s “Tortured Professor Department” videos appeared on his “for you” page.

“As a fan of Taylor Swift’s music, I was intrigued by the idea of analyzing her lyrics through a literary lens,” he said. “The course also seemed like a great opportunity to explore new perspectives on both pop culture and traditional literature.”

Seward was already familiar with writers like John Milton and Emily Dickinson, but he said the class provided a way to revisit classic works and even introduced him to new concepts, such as how Romantic poets like John Keats and William Wordsworth began valuing originality over imitation of timeless ideas.

Breaking up with breakup songs

Kinservik said that Winter Session has often been a chance for students to take a class outside their major that looks fun and interesting — like studying Taylor Swift’s music — but it was also important to firmly connect the content to literary traditions.

He chose to focus on distinct literary concepts: archetype, genre, message songs versus story songs and authorship, identifying them in Swift’s lyrics, then relating those songs to examples from British literature.

Swift’s breakup songs are legendary, but the class learned that the genre traces back to the first-century Roman poet Ovid, whose Heroides feature scorned lovers expressing their sorrow and anger at the exes who left them. In a video promoting the course, UD students were given a line of poetry and asked if it came from a 2000-year-old poem or brand-new song, and they often didn’t know the answer.

To promote the class, undergraduate intern Madison Shaffery helped Matt Kinservik and Rachel Lapp create a series of short-form videos. Here students are challenged to decide if a line is from a 2000-year-old poem or a Taylor Swift song.

Swift or Ovid: https://capture.udel.edu/media/1_7eqz13y8/

Although Swifties love to search for the biographical references in the artist’s work, Kinservik urged students to “break up with the breakup song,” explaining that even songs where she mentions herself, like “Clara Bow” and “the last great american dynasty” can and should be evaluated using the analysis students are asked to apply to works like Elizabeth Barret Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” or Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”

Senior communication major Dan Steenkamer agreed that evaluating Swift’s work on its own merit was helpful, even necessary.

“I actually don’t know a ton about her previous relationships, but the reality is that taking the work on its own, knowing whether it applies to a genre or an archetype, tells us something about how it follows the literary tradition,” he said. “Something that applies in both the songs and the literature is how it can really be analyzed and valued for the years that go beyond the authors or the speaker’s time.”

Students in the class explored the concept of authorship and the impact a writer’s personal life can and should have on how we critique a work — especially relevant for some of Swift’s infamous breakup songs.

Breakup songs: https://capture.udel.edu/media/1_o6tnxr2m/

Create now

Kinservik served on UD’s Artificial Intelligence for Teaching and Learning Working Group, and he is a strong proponent of understanding how to responsibly use artificial intelligence. He and Lapp decided that making AI an integral part of the course would enhance the student experience.

“We can’t ignore AI,” he said. “We’ve got to start teaching the use and critique of these tools because they are already ubiquitous.”

After reading the literature, listening to the songs and watching the videos, students used a variety of AI tools to for assignments: using a music generator to write a song in a style similar to Swift’s music, prompting an image generator to create an album cover, and asking a text generator to adapt lyrics into a new style — tasks that would be far more difficult without using AI tools.

The generator album covers represented genres like the “mad woman” (here represented by male figures) and the “tortured poet” to demonstrate their grasp of the literary concepts. (From left to right: Dan Steenkamer, Elena Burton)

“I am very creative but often lack the technical skills to have the vision come to life, so OpenAI was helpful in creating the album cover,” said Sam Wagner, an academic advisor at UD who registered for the class to strengthen her commitment to lifelong learning.

Several students found the music generators surprising, but helpful.

Senior elementary education major Elena Burton said she plans to use the experience as a teacher.

“Sometimes coming up with songs or chants can be tricky, but now I can use AI to help,” she said.

Sophomore Lilly Woulfe is majoring in music composition and flute performance, but even she found AI song generation helpful.

“In my creative process, this AI helps a lot if I know what sort of piece I want to write next, I'm just struggling with a chord progression or melody,” she said.

Woulfe used AIVA to generate early drafts of her song, because the program allowed her more control in choosing the key, time signature and instrumentation in refining the output.

Students agreed that although they see the benefit in using AI, it cannot replace human input — the creativity and fine tuning that have given the world masterpieces like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” what Kinservik calls the best of the best of Romantic poems, or Swift’s “All Too Well,” which Rolling Stone ranked as her #1 song.

Studying evermore

Kinservik credits his collaboration with Lapp with combining pop culture, classic literature and modern technology in an innovative class experience, giving students an entry point to appreciating the British literary tradition.

“I didn’t know what to expect. It was definitely something different,” Steenkamer said. “But the combination was a good setup for us to succeed.”

“By basing the course on student interest and giving them a hands-on, modern learning experience, we’re better meeting their needs,” Lapp agreed.

“Taylor Swift as/and Literature” is being offered again in Summer Session.