LONDON: Academics gathered in Scotland on Friday to discuss a range of important literary topics including the racial politics of goblins, the canonisation of Neville Longbottom, and Beedle the Bard as mythopoesis in the Chaucerian tradition. Welcome to Britain’s first conference on Harry Potter.

Entitled A Brand of Fictional Magic: Reading Harry Potter as Literature, the conference brings together 60 scholars from around the world for a two-day event hosted by the University of St Andrews school of English.

Billed as the world’s first conference to discuss Harry Potter strictly as a literary text, it offers almost 50 lectures, with academics taking on issues including paganism, magic and the influence on JK Rowling of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Shakespeare. Seminar titles range from “Moral development through Harry Potter in a post-9/11 world” to “Harry Potter and Lockean civil disobedience”.

Organiser John Pazdziora, a doctoral candidate in the university’s English department, is adamant Rowling’s seven children’s books merit an academic conference.

“These are the most important, seminal texts for an entire generation of readers,” he said. “In 100, 200 years’ time, when scholars want to understand the early 21st century, when they want to understand the ethos and culture of the generation that’s just breaking into adulthood, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be looking at the Harry Potter novels.

“As literary critics, as academics, why on Earth wouldn’t we want to come to grips with these texts? There’s so much here to talk about, culturally and critically, that a two-day conference really can only get the conversation started. People will be reading and writing and studying Harry Potter for years to come.”

By arrangement with the Guardian