Music for a college classroom: A Texas school will soon offer a Harry Styles class

A new college history course at Texas State University will focus on Harry Styles and the culture of celebrity

tarting next spring, roughly 20 lucky undergraduate students will get to learn how — as the pop star so famously put it — "it's not the same as it was."

Louie Dean Valencia, a professor of digital history and a longtime Styles fan, announced on Twitter over the weekend that the university's honors college had approved his course

"Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture," for the spring of 2023.

That post has since racked up more than 10,000 likes, inspired coverage from media outlets around the world and prompted, in Valencia's estimation, hundreds of messages.

"If nothing else, the fact that this course has gotten so much global attention means maybe I know *something* about how celebrity culture works," he later tweeted

"I want students to not just learn about contemporary history, but hard skills they can use! Like how to manage a social media campaign!"

A flier for the course says it will focus on Styles and popular European culture to better understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity, covering a range of topics including gender and sexuality, internet culture, media, class and consumerism

Students will practice evaluating sources, sharpen their visual and auditory analysis and learn technical skills such as audio editing as they work toward their final project, a podcast.

THE CLIMATE CRIMINAL