Harry Potter has enrolled in the fall semester at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry — sort of. To us muggles (that’s non-wizards if you haven’t read the books), we call it Durham University, the UK site where much of the Harry Potter books-turned-movies have been filmed. To honor J.K. Rowling‘s work even further, the Department of Education is offering undergraduates a course centered on “the boy who lived.”
“It seeks to place the series in its wider social and cultural context and will explore some fundamental issues such as the moral universe of the school,” Dr. Martin Richardson, head of the department and creator of the course, said. “You just need to read the academic writing which started to emerge four or five years ago to see that Harry Potter is worthy of serious study.”
About 80 students have signed up for “Harry Potter and the Age of Illusion,” but at this point, it’s strictly academic. There’s been no word of Durham joining the International Quidditch Association, a real-life sporting organization where teams from more than 400 colleges compete in the game that originated in the Harry Potter books. Since humans can’t really fly, they settle for running up and down a pitch, straddling broomsticks. The fourth annual World Cup is in New York this November — just enough time for these 80 Durham students to pull together a team.
“Harry Potter is a culturally iconic phenomenon and has already been the subject of many well-regarded academic studies over recent years, so it is only fitting that a leading university like Durham responds to new developments in our academic and wider social and cultural environment in developing new modules like this,” said the registrar of Durham University, Carolyn Fowler.
We wonder if their first lesson will be potions with Professor Snape?
Photo by ffg via Flickr.