The All-New, Even Better MuggleNet?

We’ll learn a lot more I hope on 5 February, this coming Wednesday.

She equates the “passionate partners” that helped MuggleNet staff escape Dose Media and founder Emerson Spartz with the Weasley twins. Forgive me for dreading the possibility that this means Dan Fogler and Ezra Miller are now decision makers at MNet!

My best guess is that the new partners are Macmillan publishers, with whom MNet is coming out with a Character Compendium — a Harry Potter Lexicon by a different name? — in the coming months. Media Lab Books is the Macmillan imprint and they seem a good match for the projects Kat Miller mentions.

The good news? MuggleNet will soon be back online with all its Reading, Writing, Rowling podcasts from Katy Mcdaniel and the Bertholda’s Notebook posts by Beatrice Groves. They’re free at last from the profiteering Spartz and his click-bait empire.

The scary part? We don’t know yet who the new partners are or their relationship with the MNet leadership and staff.

See you Wednesday for an update!

The Strange Case of the Missing Fan Site

MuggleNet.com is the Coke to Leaky-Cauldron.org’s Pepsi in Harry Potter fandom. The site is the click bait tool of Emerson Spartz, founder and CEO of Spartz Media, now Dose (see the 2015 New Yorker profile: ‘The King of Clickbait’ for all you need to know about him). Though primarily aimed at the movie, memorabilia, and phone app-gaming focused tribes within the Hogwarts Horde, MuggleNet has hosted both the MuggleNet Academia and Reading, Writing Rowling podcasts and Beatrice Groves’ ‘Bathilda’s Notebook’ entries for serious readers of J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith.

The news? This website has been down without explanation since 13 December 2019.

The MuggleNet.com home page offers the following explanation:  [Read more…]

Why More College Students Should Attend Harry Potter Conferences.

Few things make a professor happier than seeing students go on to great things after graduation. I was thrilled recently to see a Facebook post about a student who was just awarded her PhD in archeology. The sight was doubly meaningful because this was the student I took to the first Harry Potter conference I ever attended, almost exactly 8 years ago:  JMU’s Replacing Wands With Quills. I reminded her of that in my congratulatory Facebook note and she fondly remembered the conference as “thrilling event to dip my toes into.” 

This prompted me to look up the handful of other undergraduate students that I had involved in Harry Potter or similar scholarship: students who had attended the Chestnut Hill Harry Potter Academic Conference, guested on Mugglenet Academia, or co-presented a Divergent and Neuroscience poster in the teaching section of the Society for Neuroscience Annual meeting. As expected, I found a number of success stories: two currently in PhD programs in clinical psychology and biochemistry , two completed masters degrees in engineering and industrial/organizational psychology, one currently in an information science masters program, one who had the rare honor of publishing her undergraduate thesis. It appears that these early professional experiences–where students learn not only that they have good ideas but that others want to hear about them–are associated with later success, even when the students ultimately pursue an entirely different area of study from Potter Punditry. 

Of course, correlation does not equal causation; it is likely that the talent and initiative students show in seeking out these experiences are the same traits that lead to academic success later on.  But it also appears that many look back on the Harry Potter academic experience as particularly meaningful in shaping their self-confidence as scholars. 

On that note, it is worth announcing the CFP for the other major showcase for Potter scholarship:  The Southwest Popular/American Culture Association annual meeting in February.  See below.

The deadline for proposals for the 2020 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) is ONE WEEK from today!

The 2020 SWPACA conference will be held Feb 19-22, 2020 at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We invite proposals for any topic related to popular and/or American culture studies. See further details:http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/

Submit your proposal here: https://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca by November 20, 2019.

 

Alohamora Podcast: Ring Composition 2

This time last year Kat Miller and the Alohamora gang at MuggleNet invited me on their super-powered podcast to speak to their global audience about Ring Composition. That first show — which you can listen to here — went over so well that they invited me back to talk in much greater detail about one pair of books, Chamber of Secrets and Half-Blood Prince, and the many correspondences between them. It was a lot of fun, even “geeky glee,” which you’d expect with readers who know the Hogwarts Saga as well as the Alohamora crowd do. Click on the link below in Kat’s announcement of the episode, have a listen, and then let me know what you think!

EPISODE 281: RING COMPOSITION, PART DEUX – THE BOOK INSIDE THE BOOK

Wipe off the floor under where you’re sitting and get ready for another jaw dropping Ring Composition episode. Part Deux is here!

Agatha Christie: Ginny-Ginevra Source?

One of my first mistakes as a Potter Pundit was in the names chapter of Hidden Key to Harry Potter (2002) in which I asserted that Ginny Weasley’s first name was obviously an affectionate diminutive for ‘Virginia.’ The book wasn’t out for more than a few weeks before Rowling explained that Ginny’s given name at birth was ‘Ginevra,’ an archaic form of ‘Guinevere.’ Given the King Arthur elements if the Chamber of Secrets finale, that was a delightful bit of back story I added to the updates to Hidden Key (now How Harry Cast His Spell).

And I thought that was all I would ever need to know about Ginny Weasley’s name. If you check out the ‘Ginny’ pages at The Harry Potter Lexicon, at Wikipedia, at Harry Potter Wiki, and at PotterMore, ‘Ginevra’ is what you get without much further explanation beyond ‘Guinevere.’ Unless you think it being the Italian word for the Swiss City ‘Geneva’ is a big deal.

I was researching some things Rowling has said about her fondness for detective stories and Agatha Christie in particular yesterday, though, and found a real treasure in an unexpected place. First, though, what Rowling said about Agatha Christie in her Val McDermid interview about Cormoran Strike (2014): [Read more…]