Taylor Swift ‘swiftposium’ kicks off in Melbourne: ‘I once got a lot of judgment in my field’

About 400 academic papers from 78 research institutes were submitted for an event that pushes back against gendered bias to take the pop phenomenon seriously

When the title of Dr Georgia Carroll’s thesis was read out at her graduation ceremony, the room laughed. A lot has changed in just a year: her subject was Taylor Swift fans – and she’s the one laughing now.

“A lot of people still automatically think, ‘Oh, Taylor Swift is a silly thing to study,’ but it’s no more niche than studying some tiny scientific aspect of something,” says Carroll, who has loved Swift’s music since she was 14. “I think academia is sometimes a bit scared of the popular. But we need more people studying these really relevant cultural moments.”