I spoke at the James Madison University Harry Potter conference and it was an unadulterated pleasure! If you haven’t been, you should go this year; if you have been, you’re already itching to register; and, if you have a Hogwarts talk for serious readers you’ve been waiting for the perfect place to pitch it (not being a summer fandom gathering type?), then read the details below and submit your proposal for the JMU decision makers to ponder. See you there, DV!

Emerging From the Pensieve: A Decade of Harry Potter Scholarship

James Madison University, VA; October 11-13, 2012

“I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

-Albus Dumbledore

Dumbledore’s pensieve is a place of examination and reflection created from his thoughts and memories.  Revisiting these memories reveals patterns and details that no other method would uncover and allows him to interact with, explore, and share his thoughts.

Over the past decade, readers from around the world have immersed themselves in a shared pensieve: the Harry Potter franchise.  They have explored the world of Harry Potter and shared the results of their inquiries and interpretations with each other.  Technology has given them the opportunity to construct a pensieve without boundaries.  Curiosity and an interdisciplinary spirit, made possible by enterprising scholars, have continually provided the material to add to the pensive.

Like the pensieve this symposium is an opportunity to reflect on the shared world that Harry Potter has created.  Last year’s theme, “Replacing Wands with Quills”, gathered scholars from many backgrounds to present their own unique research. This year, we seek to revisit past contributions to the pensieve and invite new ones, so that we can dive into and then emerge from our pensieve to share new insight.

We welcome programming on the following topic areas and beyond: [Read more…]

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!

MuggleNet.com, the only other Harry Potter fan site to get the monster ‘hit’ numbers of the Leaky Cauldron, has gone all out in its determination to raise the bar of fandom conversation about the Hogwarts Saga. In a new page they’re calling MuggleNet Academia, they will be featuring interviews with professors, literary critics, even lawyers and translators, to explore, you guessed it, the artistry and meaning of the world’s best selling books. Programs will be podcast and then available as transcribed posts.

I say “they” but “we” is closer to the truth. MuggleNet has invited me to Co-host the Academia podcasts alongside Keith Hawk — and you are welcome to participate as well! Send the pertinent information requested at the programs web page directly to Keith and you can join us as a Guest Host in conversation with the leading lights of the Harry Potter book world.

Please give this month’s Academia installment, the program premiere, a listen — ‘Getting Serious about Series,’ a conversation with Washington & Lee professor (and good friend of this blog) Suzanne Keen about what sort of book(s) the Hogwarts adventures are — and leave your thoughts about the show at MuggleNet or here at HogwartsProfessor. Let the decision makers there know what you like and don’t like — so we can provide more of the former and less of the latter.

What I really want right away, though, are your suggestions about guests you’d like to hear on MuggleNet Academia! Thanks in advance for letting me know your thoughts about the premiere, the concept of the program, and, most pressing, your preferences for future podcast topics and guest experts.

UPDATE: The first program is now available for easy downloading via iTunes…

On our drive north to Cedar Rapids for Pascha services last weekend, we listened to the second ‘Underland Chronicle‘ by Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, and the clan’s love for Ripred the Rat grew and grew. We didn’t have the third Chronicle, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, or we certainly would have listened to that on the drive home (more in the coming week on Gregor and what the story structures and messages of these books tell us about Hunger Games). We settled on Alan Cumming’s recordings of Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan, a SteamPunk trilogy that my son Timothy loved as much for the book’s illustrations as the bizarre story line.

It was good enough that after eleven hours on the road we drove around Oklahoma City lest we have to unpack the car before the chapter we were listening to ended. Cumming is brilliant — wonderful Scottish, English, and Austrian accents — but the story is just about as engaging as a re-telling of The Guns of August can get. I added the second and third books of this series, Behemoth and Goliath, to the already dangerously high pile of books I’m reading — and thought I’d ask you all what you’re reading today. To encourage you to share your current favorite along with a line about why you’re reading it or how you learned about it and your yay or nay recommendation, here are the titles on my list, below Westerfield’s three wonderful books:

[Read more…]

In discussing last week what J. K. Rowling might be aiming for in writing A Casual Vacancy, an “adult” novel, after her Hogwarts Saga, I suggested this could be her ‘Equus moment.’ The reference was to actor Daniel Radcliffe’s decision in 2007 to take the part of Alan Strang in the revival of Peter Schaeffer’s Tony Award winning play, Equus. The play is a psychological, even theological thriller that explores the intersections of sex, faith, conventions, and fulfillment; Radcliffe’s effort in a remarkably demanding role was lauded with a nomination for ‘Outstanding Actor’ Drama Desk award.

Sadly, his decision is mostly remembered by Harry Potter fans (including this one) because the Strang role required that Radcliffe appear naked on the stage, which represented something of a break with his ‘Boy Who Lived’ image (you’ll recall that Warner Brothers elected not to portray ‘Raging Harry’ in Order of the Phoenix at story’s beginning or end lest the audience lose their sympathy with the films’ clean cut character).

The Equus nudity was not gratuitous but by doffing his clothes in public Radcliffe became to many a “serious actor,” which is to say, “not just a child star.” We can see other players pursuing similar “Equus Moments,” points of separation from how they are understood, in Ms. Rowling’s attempt to don the Orwellian mantle of political satirist in Vacancy and Jennifer Lawrence’s decision to do an essentially pornographic photo shoot to change public perception of her as an actress after she failed to be considered for alluring women’s parts post Winter’s Bone.

And now Emma Watson, do-gooder Hermione Granger to millions, seems to be reaching for a break with her relatively innocent past. She is featured in a new movie called The Bling Ring, which one online article has described as her “Bad Girl Makeover.”

Emma Watson’s days of playing Hermione Granger are well behind her as she debuts a sexy new look for her new film “The Bling Ring.”

The British actress — best known for her role as a spell-casting schoolgirl in the “Harry Potter” franchise — has undergone a complete transformation for her part as a bad girl in the Sofia Coppola-directed flick about the group of California teenagers who robbed the homes of a long list of celebrities, including Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox. In new photos taken on the Venice Beach movie set, Watson shows off a whole new side, parading around in Daisy Dukes and a bra — baring her belly — while wearing animal-print heels.

Read the whole thing for the details. Ms. Watson has had other roles during and after the Warner Brothers Potter Saga adaptations, but the G-Rated Ballet Shoes and The Tale of Despereaux weren’t going to get her “serious” roles or JLawr-like attention. Maybe the exposed brassiere will help?

O, Tempora! O Mores! Or not? Your thoughts, please… Hat tip to RevGeorge!