Grand Theft Auto has been blamed for everything from teenage crime waves to wasted weekends, but now the infamous franchise is stepping into a different spotlight: higher education. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville will offer a new course called Grand Theft America: U.S. History Since 1980 Through the GTA Video Games, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
The class, officially listed as HIST 150, kicks off in spring 2026 and will be led by Dr. Tore Olsson, the historian who previously turned Red Dead Redemption into an academic deep dive on the Wild West. This time, he’s using GTA’s fictional cities and satirical chaos to dig into what his University of Tennessee faculty page calls “the major social, cultural, political, and economic transformations that remade the United States since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.”
“Big announcement on my new class on history through video games!” Olsson captioned a clip of himself announcing the news on Friday, September 19. “I’m thrilled to announce my new class at the University of Tennessee for next semester,” he says. “The class is called History 150: Grand Theft America. Yup, you heard me right — we got a GTA college history class before we got GTA 6.”
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