I will be speaking at Augustana College in April this year and Travis Prinzi will be there as well via interactive electronic media as part of the discussion on that campus about diversity, tolerance, and postmodern morality in general. Richard Priggie, the Augustana professor offering a course on ‘The Postmodern World of Harry Potter,’ has asked Mr. Prinzi and me to help expand the list of controversial topics his students can explore in their term papers. Both of us agreed to post his list and ask readers here and at The Hog’s Head to volunteer their own ideas; Mr. Prinzi, as usual, beat me to this task and did a better job than I would have. Please read the parameters for these thesis paper subjects — one of which is that it has to be a subject discussed at our sister sites! — at the Hog’s Head post and be sure to check out the great subjects already suggested in the comment boxes there.
I’d only note here what is obvious in reading the topics these students will be discussing, namely, that the shared text of the Hogwarts adventures provide a singular and elevated starting place for conversations about literature, morality, and spirituality. We can only hope in the years to come that more professors like Richard Priggie will be using their students’ familiarity with and appreciation of these novels to go “further up and further in.”
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