Vampires at Harvard?

EDUCATION: This year, students will be signing up to learn about Harry Potter, as well as vampires and zombies, at top universities around the world. The courses aren't just hocus pocus, however, as they promise to focus on serious topics.

Durham University, which is ranked consistently as one of the UK’s top 25 universities, is offering the “Harry Potter and the Age of Illusion” module as part of the university's Education Studies BA degree. The course will give students the chance to examine how literature affects culture, a spokesman for the university told The Guardian. So far, about 80 undergraduates have signed up for the optional module.

Are the Harry Potter novels, written by JK Rowling, worthy of serious academic study? Dr Martin Richardson, head of the Department of Education at Durham University, believes they are. "The module … will use the text and films to shed light on contemporary society and look at the wider moral universe of the school environment, considering such issues as prejudice, intolerance, courage and friendship,“ he wrote in The Times Higher Education magazine.

Students who prefer vampires to wizards might consider studying in the US. The Harvard University Extension School offers an undergraduate course on vampires. “The Vampire in Literature and Film” could be more demanding than the course at Durham. Modern works on the syllabus include Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga, but also short vampire poems by Lord Byron, the 19th-century English poet, and papers by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst.

Jonathan Shorr, University of Baltimore


"They think they're taking this wacko zombie course, and they are."

Also, the University of Baltimore is offering a course on zombies (not "zombie banks", but the kind found in horror stories). The chairman of the university's school of communications design, Jonathan Shorr, explained to The Baltimore Sun why the course is a good way to get young students interested in sociology and literature. "They think they're taking this wacko zombie course, and they are. But on the way, they learn how literature and mass media work, and how they come to reflect our times."