Texas State University to Offer Course Centered Around Harry Styles

Texas State University will launch a course next year on Harry Styles, which promises to delve much deeper than just an exploration into the singer’s work.

Louie Dean Valencia, associate professor of digital history at Texas State, announced last week that he will be teaching an Honors College course titled “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture” in Spring 2023.

The flier outlines a broader focus on Styles and how he factors into the “cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture and consumerism.”

Valencia spoke with The SYSCA Daily about the road leading up to proposing the course, starting, of course, with his fandom of Styles and One Direction, which he attributes to getting him through grad school in New York City. He said the pandemic steered him towards thinking about “the world that influences him—music, film, literature—, and how he influences the world.”

“In short, as an historian, I want the class to get to really see how the world has changed in the last 12 years or so, but also how to put that into historical context, through the lens of Harry Styles—and how they can learn from him and his art, activism, and philosophy, like any great artist,” Valencia explained.

Valencia also told CNN that he has been in far too many conversations with students over the last two years that started with a shared admiration for his music, but eventually branched off into “larger societal questions about gender, sexuality, race, gun control, sustainability because of Harry’s art.”

Aside from examining Styles’ music and films, Valencia will also task his students with creating a podcast series about the topic.