As she prepared to play Kansas City in the summer of 2023, Taylor Swift took a moment to post to Instagram, wishing her fans a belated and happy Independence Day. The next night, she met football player Travis Kelce—the man she was going to marry, although neither of them knew it then. Almost exactly three years later, the two are preparing to tie the knot, and New Haven-based Professor Sara Baker Bailey has a lot to say about it.
Baker Bailey is a professor of communication, media, and screen studies at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) in New Haven’s Beaver Hills neighborhood. For a year now, she has been teaching a course on what she calls “Swiftology,” which is a study on all things Taylor Swift. So she’s feeling excited for this holiday weekend, when Swift and Kelce are set to wed at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
“It's a theme, it’s a topic that she’s talked about since her very first debut album. We have obviously watched her go through a lot of heartbreak, a lot of breakup, there are some very powerful and emotional songs connected with that,” Baker Bailey said in a phone call Thursday, referring to the event as the “royal wedding.” “To see our girl finally getting her happy ending just feels 20 years in the making.”
For Baker Bailey, who studied public relations at Virginia Tech and communications at San Diego State University and the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, it’s a moment—one in an increasing number, at least in recent years—where pop culture meets her academic work. For over a decade, she has taught courses in public speaking, human communication, workplace communication, and crisis communication at SCSU, with an interest in how communication intersects with the performance of gender, sex, and sexuality.
Then around 2024, she started working on “Swiftology” after her department chair suggested that professors needed to find more creative and current ways of teaching. When she proposed a class on Taylor Swift, she remembered, he was delighted, and immediately approved it. To her surprise, she found that the majority of students who enrolled in class weren’t actually Swifties—they just wanted to understand the hype around her work. Baker Bailey said that she loves seeing them discover the world of Taylor Swift.
The first course fortuitously coincided with Swift’s Eras Tour, a pop culture phenomenon that grossed over $2 billion and brought in over 10 million people. And that was just the beginning of Baker Bailey’s love story with the material.
Baker Bailey is something of a Swiftie herself. While she’s long known and followed Swift’s work, which waltzed into the pop culture canon with “Love Story” in 2009, Baker Bailey became interested in it when Swift announced that she would be revisiting her master rerecordings in 2021, after a public dispute with music manager Scooter Braun. In their fight, Baker Bailey saw “a powerful story about how that’s her intellectual property.”
Baker Bailey credited her academic background, meanwhile, with helping her make “Swiftology” into a course that is as rigorous as it is interesting. She’s genuinely intrigued by Swift’s power to communicate, including her ability to create “very personal and intimate relationships with her fans” despite a degree of both wealth and physical remove that might, for another star of her status, create a degree of remove.
When the pop star got engaged to Kelce last August, Baker Bailey saw it as a moment that would soon be enshrined in pop cultural history (and it was, almost immediately). Swift, who has grown up in the spotlight, is a cultural icon who has had her own relationship with fame. Kelce, a football tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, has become a frequent voice and face on podcasts with his brother, Jason.
“This is as close to a royal wedding as we would get as Americans,” Baker Bailey said. For that reason, Madison Square Garden makes sense to her: it’s as culturally iconic as they are. Swift has both performed there, including during her inaugural “Fearless” tour, and was recently there to root on the New York Knicks in game four of the NBA Finals. The complex’s aesthetic fits her 2025 album, Life of a Showgirl, Baker Bailey said. She added that the privacy the two have tried to maintain around the wedding is “sacred and really special.”
“I want to give myself a tiny pat on the back,” she added jokingly. “Because when the engagement was announced last year, I very quickly said, ‘You know what would be great? A July 4 wedding next year.’ And I’m glad she heard and listened to me. I think my invitation got lost in the mail.”
Swift, she explained, loves the Fourth of July. In the past, she’s been known for throwing large parties around the day, including those that members of the press and fans have tried to crash in years past. In 2023, it was around this time of year that she posted “Happy belated Independence Day from your local neighborhood independent girlies,” with a photo of herself and friends on a sprawling lawn, a body of water in the background. She met Kelce at a show in Kansas City the next day.
The good juju has extended to New Haven more broadly, too. Self-described swiftie Sofia Urios-Seibert, a college student at Syracuse University and an intern at the Yale University Art Gallery, said that she is “very happy for Taylor,” as are most people in Swift’s fanbase.
Now that Swift and Kelce are preparing for their upcoming wedding, Baker Bailey said “it’s like an invisible string” bringing the two together. “Three years later, here we are, and it’s the talk of the town.”
This article comes from the ninth and current cohort of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). From June 29 through August 21, YAJI students pitch, report, write and edit stories with Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman, Program Assistants Abiba Biao and Grayce Howe and Mentor Ruby Szekeres. Zahara (Zazie) Gazzola is a rising sophomore at Wilbur Cross High School and the ACES Educational Center for the Arts.
