Paula Clare Harper, an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago and a 2010 graduate of the institution, focuses her research on music, sound, and internet culture. She coedited the essay collection Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans and is currently working on another book titled Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms. This forthcoming work examines how online musical virality has developed over time.
Harper’s academic journey shifted from Renaissance polyphony to exploring intersections between music and media during her graduate studies. “I was originally under the misapprehension that the music I might want to study was the music I was most interested in as a performer, which was and is Renaissance polyphony. But it turns out there’s a really specific type of person who is good at being an early musicologist, and I am not that type of person!” she said.
She described how her interests evolved after taking courses about music and media: “When I was in graduate school, I took a bunch of classes about music and media, and I really enjoyed those. The adviser I thought I was going to work with went on leave for a while. And while left to my own devices, I did things like write a paper about Beyoncé and performances of truth and authenticity in contemporary popular music, and no one stopped me. So I was like, all right, down this path I go.”
Harper’s scholarship often explores subjects that exist outside mainstream discussions in digital culture. “I’m always interested in the edges of things—objects or practices that don’t feel like they’re in the center of the conversation. So right now I’m writing about virality and music and the internet, but I’m not really writing about music platforms like Spotify. Instead I’m asking, ‘In what ways is Twitter a music platform? In what ways was GeoCities a music platform in the early 2000s?’ Thinking around corners and looking at things that feel more like edge cases is something I really find fascinating,” she explained.
Addressing challenges posed by digital ephemerality for researchers studying internet history or online communities, Harper noted: “Every single day I’m stressed about it. There’s this big refrain of ‘the internet is forever, the internet always has receipts’—which is both true and untrue.” She added that many aspects disappear due to issues such as discontinued domains or defunct hosting services: “Corporate takeover and lack of upkeep have really decimated some of the archives of the early internet.”
To overcome these obstacles when primary sources vanish from online spaces—a phenomenon known as link rot—Harper relies on traditional archival methods including newspaper archives from past decades to reconstruct missing content references. She also credits amateur archivists who preserve material by reposting it on more stable platforms as well as nonprofit organizations such as Internet Archive for enabling her research.
Discussing how her book project on Taylor Swift originated during early stages of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns alongside fellow scholars Christa Anne Bentley and Kate Galloway through organizing an academic conference before editing their volume together, Harper said: “But at that point there wasn’t a lot of academic writing on Taylor Swift at all…We knew we wanted music scholars…This was also the era of ‘Taylor’s Version’ rerecordings so we wanted to think about music and copyright.” The group aimed to use Swift’s career as an entry point into broader topics including 21st-century popular music trends as well as global digital culture.
On balancing personal interest with professional analysis regarding Taylor Swift fandoms versus scholarly engagement with pop culture phenomena more generally: “I prefer to be called a Swift scholar rather than a Swiftie…I don’t want any Swiftie stolen valor…The way that I relate pleasurefully to texts is through close reading…There’s always potential that a thing I'm really fascinated by is going to become subject matter for scholarship or vice versa.”
When asked which version of Taylor Swift's song "All Too Well" she prefers personally—and reflecting critically on its marketing—Harper responded: “My personal favorite is the ‘Sad Girl Autumn Version.’ It’s partly because I love a pensive girl at her piano...it feels very of the moment that everything becomes commodity—you know—that season could be vibe…and yet it still works on me! When put on song wish were fall wearing sweater.”
This interview first appeared in University of Chicago Magazine's Summer 2025 issue.