Ms McCausland told The Guardian:"What I want to do is show students that although these texts might seem inaccessible, they can be accessible if we look at them from a slightly different angle.
"So, Shakespeare, in some way, is actually addressing a lot of the same questions as Taylor Swift is today, which seems crazy. But he is."The academic said that in Swift's The Great War she saw parallels with how Sylvia Plath wrote about war and battle to show the pain she felt in her poem Daddy. Also, the way the US singer's song Mad Woman covers patriarchy and mental health could be linked to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper.Taylor Swift's surprise announcement
Ms McCausland insisted the"primary focus is literature" and the course would be grounded in academics, rather than setting up a fan club, but she wants her students to"think critically about Swift". "I want to show my students how much fun historical English literature can be," she told Het Laaatste Nieuws.