Texas State University is offering a course about Harry Styles

Calling all Harry Styles fans: Texas State is planning to offer the world’s first-ever course on the work of the pop superstar next spring. There’s just one caveat: the university’s honors college students get first dibs.

Associate Professor of Digital History Louie Dean Valencia announced the course, dubbed “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet, and European Pop Culture,” on Twitter Saturday and news of it quickly spread among “Stylers” on social media. The class will first be offered in Spring 2023 on Mondays and Wednesdays at 11 a.m. 

The class is also open to non-honors students, Valencia said on Twitter, however those being considered will “just need to show an ‘outstanding talent in an area of interest.'”

In an interview with Sh-t You Should Care About, Valencia said he was inspired to create the course because he’s always been a big One Direction and Harry Styles fan, adding that they helped get him through grad school in New York.

“I’ve been to several 1D shows and four shows since he’s been solo (with many more to come),” Valencia said. “Whilst doing concurrent research on the history of HIV/AIDS in Europe, this summer I’ve visited his hometown, an exhibition feature his fashion in London, and have seen him in Manchester and Paris. I will be seeing him in concert again next week in Madrid.” 

Valencia said his class proposal was 23 pages long and was scrutinized by a panel of Texas State professors before it was approved by the university. The course will offer historical context for how the world has changed during the past 12 years, “starting with Harry’s first introduction to the world stage,” Valencia said. However, it will also, through the lens of Styles, detail how students “can learn from him and his art, activism, and philosophy, like any great artist,” as well as focus on fashion, fan culture, internet culture and consumerism. 

Students will study Styles’ music and films, as well as read novels from a selection of his favorite authors, including Haruki Murakami, Bethan Roberts, and Susan Sontag. They’ll “also learn more about the things he is passionate about. So thinking about issues of sexism, queerphobia, racism, gun control, and a slew of other topics,” Valencia said on TikTok Monday. Each will also be responsible for creating and developing a podcast series.

During his TikTok, Valencia said the class “isn’t about [Styles’] personal life, it’s not about anything that is not publicly made about him,” he explained, but rather the class is intended to be a way for students to learn about the world that we live in. “Really the idea of the class is that we’re going to learn about the things that he puts out there and through that lens learn more about both his music, his artistry and also hopefully, a little bit about ourselves,” Valencia said. 

Fans took to social media to rejoice about the news, one commenting on Instagram, “The only good news coming out of Texas right now.” Another wrote: “EXCUSE ME WHY AM I NOT ATTENDING THESE SCHOOLS.”

Others were skeptical about the purpose of the class, one writing: “Genuinely asking….why is fandom important enough to make it a class?”