The Bowers Writers House sponsored the event “Running for Platform 9 3/4: A Harry Potter Panel Experience w/ Dr. Christina Phillips-Mattson” Thursday, Nov. 8 at 7 p.m.

Dr. Christina Phillips-Mattson is a Harry Potter professional; she received her Bachelor’s degree in English, French and comparative humanities at Bucknell University and her Master’s and doctorate degrees in comparative literature with a focus in Children’s Literature from Harvard University.

She published her dissertation as a book entitled “Children’s Literature Grows Up: Harry Potter and the Children’s Literature Revolution” in 2017.

Elizabethtown College visiting assistant professor of English Dr. Tara Moore and junior professional writing major and Etownian Copy Chief Stephanie Miller also joined Phillips-Mattson.

Nearly all of the seats in the Bowers Writers House were filled when Director of the Bowers Writers House Jesse Waters introduced the event.

Even though he is not personally a Harry Potter fan, he admired “how something can maintain a heavy level of popularity in culture can also be analyzed and criticized.”

He then introduced Moore. Her areas of research include life-long learning and dystopian young adult novels. Her first-year seminar is entitled FYS: Harry Potter and the Spell of Story. Many of her students were in attendance.

Miller then had the opportunity to explain her honors research project. She has been a Harry Potter fan since she was 11 years old, so her overall premise of her project is searching for signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the characters of the last four Harry Potter novels.

She explained that PTSD is a “disorder that develops in those who experienced scary, dangerous, traumatic experiences.”

She acknowledged that not everyone who has traumatic experiences will develop PTSD, but many still have symptoms.

Miller’s project is a “work in progress,” and she chose to focus on the last four books because they contain “events that Harry is old enough to grieve.”

She discussed several PTSD symptoms, such as reexperiencing trauma, which can involve flashbacks and nightmares of the event, hypervigilance, anxiety, avoidance of triggers and distorted feelings of guilt. She noted examples of characters who experienced these symptoms in the Harry Potter books.

Miller will finish her project next spring, but at this point, she cannot responsibly diagnose anyone in Harry Potter with PTSD.

Phillips-Mattson then explained her research in her dissertation-turned-book, “Children’s Literature Grows Up” (her department made her cut her Harry Potter subtitle for the dissertation).

She chose this topic because even though children’s literature changes lives, “children’s literature never enjoyed same academic attention as adult literature.”

She explained how children’s literature is not taken seriously at the academic or scholarly level, hearing often, “This isn’t a novel, it’s a children’s book.”

Many critics of Harry Potter, such as Harold Bloom, reveal academia’s ignorance of how children’s literature “influenced and existed next to adult literature for centuries.”

Phillips-Mattson’s ultimate argument is that “children’s literature is undergoing a metamorphosis” and that J.K. Rowling is changing how the children’s literature is being written and received through her “stylistic sophistication” of her Harry Potter series.

In her book, she first outlines the history of children’s literature, placing special emphasis on Henry James’ 1899 essay, “Future of the Novel.”

In the essay, James believes that novels are not “high art” because they are created to be read and understood by everyone (meaning women and children). He saw this as a problem because the “educated white male” could handle something more complex.

Subsequently, novels did become high art because they became more about human experiences and taboo subjects, whereas children’s novels “became increasingly simplistic in writing styles.”

This was a trend until Rowling changed the children’s novel. One prominent example that Phillips-Mattson discussed is Rowling’s “spell language,” which on the surface appears to be nonsense.

However, Rowling uses her spell language to “examine the protagonist’s education and morals and the tension between the interior self and the exterior actions.”

She also examines how the Harry Potter novels can be seen as classics according to T.S. Eliot’s essay, “What Is a Classic?”

The event concluded with questions from the audience for both Miller and Phillips-Mattson, and afterwards everyone in attendance was able to enjoy Harry Potter-themed snacks and desserts at a small reception.

Everyone also had the chance to purchase Phillips-Mattson’s book using student charge.