MuggleNet Academia, a venture I co-host, as explained here earlier this week is up and running with the first show featuring an interview with Washington & Lee’s Suzanne Keen. The show is earning raves with more than 2,000 tweets and FaceBook mentions.
One of the hopes of the show is to provide, in addition to thoughtful conversation focused on the world’s best selling books, a list of the courses about the Hogwarts Saga or those featuring Harry Potter in a significant way. Keith Hawk over at MuggleNet has already prepared the page for this listing of University and College Courses but he has asked me to enlist the HogPro All-Pros here to share what courses they have taken or heard of.
A quick Google search, for example, brings up Best Harry Potter Courses (MovieFone, 11 Nov 2010), 15 Fascinating Harry Potter Courses (BestCollegesOnline.com, 18 July 2011), and a note from the University of Nebraska: “Plans for a new 200-level Harry Potter English class for the fall semester of 2013 are under way.” With Harry Potter the Shared Text of Generation Hex, I assume the school year 2012-13, classes for which older students have already registered, will include a tide if not a tsunami of new explorations of Harry’s adventures.
Thanks in advance for sharing the course title, the school name, the Professor’s name, and one or two sentences describing course content!
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I am teaching PLS 476-002 “Harry Potter and the Law” at Morehead State University, Morehead, KY. I am an attorney and assistant professor in the Legal Studies program at MSU. I taught the class in Spring of 2011 and am teaching the class again this Fall. The class, targeted towards non-legal studies majors, uses the Harry Potter series as a means for considering the role of the government and legal institutions, crimes and punishments, moral development, economics, and the legal profession. As a civic education service learning project, the students conclude the course by presenting a Harry Potter trial to community groups, with the community members serving as jurors.
I am teaching PHIL 332: “Harry Potter and Philosophy” at Marymount Manhattan College, NY, NY this coming Fall 2012. I ran it for the first time in Fall 2011. Here is the course description: Abstract ideas can be brought to life through the moral imagination provided by good works of fiction. In this course we will examine the popular culture phenomenon of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, which literary scholar John Granger calls our “shared text” of the twenty-first century. As we work through philosophy of literature, ethics, political philosophy, and metaphysics in relation to the narrative structure and content of Harry Potter, we’ll grapple with issues such as character, love, friendship, truth-telling, heroism, justice, law, war, punishment, identity, meaning, death, and free will.
Ooops, hit the submit button too soon…. P.S.–My name is Carrie-Ann Biondi and I’m an Associate Professor of Philosophy.
I just finished contributing a chapter for a book coming out next year titled “Teaching with Harry Potter” in which I cover some of the more interesting college courses utilizing the Harry Potter texts. The count (which I know is low, but it was of what I could find) of colleges using HP is at 52. This includes colleges from Finger Lakes Community College to Yale; and from England, across America, to China. I didn’t have Morehead State so now I know of 53.
As you know, I’ve been teaching my undergraduate/graduate “Harry Potter and His Predecessors” seminar for a decade now (!!!) at Belmont University (most recently in rotation in 2009), Lenoir-Rhyne University (most recently in rotation in 2011), and the Mythgard Institute (currently in progress).
I teach an online graduate course called “Harry Potter: Multidiscilplinary Perspectives” with material rankings from philosophy, psychology, business and history supplementing the literary analysis. I also focus on participatory culture, transmedia storytelling and copyright issues to demonstrate the breadth of Rowling’s impact on the way we interact based on text.
I’m James B. Kelley, an Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University-Meridian. This semester I’ve already covered the first Harry Potter book and film in an undergraduate course (EN 2434 Literature and Film) that’s concentrating on works dealing with the power of different forms of media, from print to film to electronic. My students have had a number of interesting exchanges concerning the muggles’ computers, the wizards’ newspapers, and even the Mirror of Erised.
I contributed a chapter to the same book that Steve talks about in an earlier post, Teaching with Harry Potter: Essays on Classroom Wizardry from Elementary School to College (forthcoming from McFarland in 2013). Here are some links to that collection:
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-With-Harry-Potter-Elementary/dp/0786472014
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/teaching-with-harry-potter-valerie-estelle-frankel/1112622258?ean=9780786472017
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15936663-teaching-with-harry-potter
I’m an Associate Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I’ll be teaching a “Sociology of Harry Potter” course this summer. In addition to a number of readings from various HP anthologies, I’ll be using The Sociology of Harry Potter, edited by Jenn Simms.
I am offering my second semester of an 200 level analytical writing course using Harry Potter. We examine the power of myth found in the story, the hero’s and destiny story of the books, the meaning of love and marriage. Through all of the topics we cover, students strengthen their analytical writing skills through the series of essays and handouts they are given. It really is so much fun to use my most beloved story to teach!