CHC Prepares for the Harry Potter Conference
By Sarah Ganassa
This year’s annual Harry Potter Conference hosted by the college allows academics to let their inner Harry Potter fanatic shine and present on various social and literary themes in J. K. Rowling’s magical world.
This year marks the fifth annual Harry Potter Conference. Patrick McCauley, associate professor of religious studies,. and Karen Wendling, associate professor of chemistry, the coordinators of this conference have nurtured this conference from the very beginning.
“The conference came about, interestingly enough, through an interdisciplinary honors program class that Dr. McCauley and I teach here at the college,” Wendling said, referring to a course called Emergence of a Hero. “From this class, we were looking at the heroic journeys that we spoke of earlier; we found that there were students that were really excited about reading modern journey and literature. The essays that students were reading from our class often focused on Harry Potter.”
This conference is unique because it is highly interdisciplinary yet solely focuses on the topic of the world of Harry Potter.
“We had the motive in mind,” McCauley said. “So we put this conference together and what we got, even though we never tried to, is one of the most naturally interdisciplinary conferences in the United States and all of academia.”
Samantha Covias, ’19, a freshman honors student at Chestnut Hill College, will be one of the many presenters at the conference, and she said she is excited to share her love of Harry Potter, but more so the in-depth character analysis as a tribute to the series underdog: Neville Longbottom.
“He is very underestimated,” Covias said of Longbottom. “I feel a connection to his character because he is just very underappreciated and he has a lot of inner strength that a lot of people actually understand. He actually ended up being a very pivotal character in the series, so that is kind of my tribute to him.”
Covias describes her paper as more than just a character analysis of her favorite character. The paper provides more than just a traditional outlook on a typical character analysis. It analyzes the character’s choices.
This year’s conference conference will include a separate section and scholarship award for high school students on Oct. 20 in the evening, which will be followed by a full day of presenters on Oct. 21.
“The list goes on and on,” Wendling said. “We have two disciplinary speakers; we have a choral presentation during lunch time, music in the rotunda, podcast, art exhibits. It is going to be epic.”
The presentations at the Harry Potter Conference provide a wide range of viewpoints, depending on the presenter’s discipline.
“Anything that you can think of, there is some connection to Harry Potter,” Wendling said. “The essays that we get at the conference often look at that connection of Harry Potter and that one field of study, or they look at an analysis within the text of Harry Potter.”
Academics from across the country present at the Harry Potter Conference and will be focusing on the elements of the Wizarding World that provide a commentary on things like social justice, gender roles, social inclusivity, science and fan fiction. People will be presenting textual and character analyses as well.
Both Wendling and McCauley will be presenting at the conference on Friday. They will be presenting from two very unique angles of world of Harry Potter.
“My presentation is Pleasant Neurochemistry of Reading Harry Potter,” Wendling said. “I am interested in what is going on in the brain when people are reading the Harry Potter books, and I think my presentation really focuses on several different layers of what is going on.”
McCauley, on the other hand, is presenting on a very different view of the Harry Potter series.
“The presentation that I am giving this year is about women and epic voyages,” McCauley said. “I started to notice in some of the female characters in Harry Potter that the image of the female as the heroine, as the protagonist, as the main figure, as the one whose journey this really is, starts to emerge in a way that hasn’t happened in popular culture.”
Attendees and presenters have expressed their appreciation for the college for mothering and hosting the conference.
“We are so happy that Chestnut Hill has continued to support this seriously,” Wendling said. “This is something that the college is doing out of the goodness of their hearts in order to give a home to the Harry Potter scholarship, and it is just wonderful how everyone, from the person setting up the chairs to the president of the college, has just been behind us one hundred percent since the very first day.”
“There has been so much positive support,” McCauley said. “It is almost like it has been magical.”
