“Searching for Platform 9¾: An Academic Harry Potter Experience” is a conference named after a secret passageway that brings one from the muggle world to the wizard world. The conference did just that for the witches and wizards of the NIU community.

The Harry Potter Ball set the festivities in motion Halloween night in the main ballroom of Altgeld Hall. The ball incorporated a silent auction with proceeds donated to the Founders Memorial Library.

The Harry Potter conference began Saturday at 9 a.m. in Reavis Hall and moved throughout DuSable into the early evening. The event consisted of a series of lectures and discussions for adults, and informative crafting sessions for students in grades 4-8.

Mark Pietrowski, coordinator of the Liberal Arts and Science External Programming, organized the conference with the help of various NIU professors and graduate students.

“We’re diving into the different aspects of the Harry Potter world,” Pietrowski said. “J.K. Rowling’s series presents a lot of material that is worthy of discussion. We’ve done other events relative to the series, but this is the first year we have held an academic conference and it has worked out really nicely.”

Sarah Greenwood, an English doctoral student, worked with the younger witches and wizards on “Muggle Studies” also known as the study of people without magical powers. The lesson included studying the history of the Mexican holiday, El Dia de Los Muertos.

Jeremy Chamberlin, 10, from Waukegan colored a picture to honor the holiday.

“I’m coloring a bright picture of a skeleton for a person that died. We’re celebrating them by drawing their favorite foods and other favorite items,” Chamberlin said.

Greenwood and the students also had a “Herbology” crash course, which investigated the species of various plants in the Harry Potter series.

Kathleen Turner, graduate assistant for the English department, discussed how influential J.K. Rowling’s work has become.

“The neat thing about the Harry Potter phenomenon is that it allows us to look at all the things going on in the world through different lenses,” Turner said. “It incorporates so many different disciplines, such as math, logic, science, gender, slavery, the list goes on.”

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