ENWL Enters Our Taylor Swift Era

With the announcement of Taylor Swift’s upcoming album titled The Tortured Poets Department, the English and World Languages Department is kicking off Taylor Swift themed events and fun leading up to a listening party on April 19th when the album drops. On this blog and social media, we will be moving through Taylor’s discography chronologically posting about unexpected connections Taylor Swift’s music has with English and World Languages (ENWL) by highlighting media, critical theories, research methods, and faculty interests tied into themes and literary connections in Taylor Swift’s lyrics and eras for each album.

This content strategy will also function as a 6-week study to measure student engagement metrics utilizing celebrity impact to generate interest in all things ENWL. Using Taylor Swift as inspiration will draw on an existing fandom to build a discourse community and provide a large base of material to fuel content. Not only will this allow us to potentially promote ENWL topics to a larger audience, but we will also be demonstrating our research techniques for this project by sharing our process on this blog including our world building strategies and research methods to show why and how ENWL research works.

The purpose of this study is two-fold: first it will establish a quantifiable content strategy to model systems of social media usage to determine the usefulness of social media to academic departments, and second it will provide additional means for students to connect with peers, professors, and ENWL media to establish community while also modeling ENWL research methods and methodologies for students to engage with. For this project, we will collect data that measures specific metrics of engagement on social media (likes, shares, comments, follower number) as well as in-person events (sign-in sheets). We will be sharing our process, documentation, and insights to show you in real time what ENWL research can do!

Join us for the next six weeks here, on Instagram (@ville.englishworldlanguage), and on Facebook (Millersville University, Department of English) as we present Swiftie connections to our discipline and envision new ways for our students to connect with each other and ENWL materials. The Department of ENWL is officially in our Taylor Swift era:)