Best Hogwarts Professor Posts of 2024

As we approach the conventional calendar’s end and the beginning of the ‘New Year,’ it’s an edifying custom to look back at the twelve months behind us as well as to look forward with hope in anticipation. I have spent the better part of the day in the review part of that effort; I’ve collected many of the more interesting of the 165 posts at Hogwarts Professor in 2024 into nine categories, from ‘Most Popular’ to ‘Most Important,’ and written a brief introduction to each of those pigeon-holes.

My conclusion after a day of sifting, sorting, smiling, and wincing? It’s been a very good year in the Rowling Studies niche of literary criticism and Hogwarts Professor has continued to be a leader in that nook of serious reading. I am very grateful for the thousands of readers who join us here on a daily basis and I am especially thankful to those on our staff who contribute posts and to those in our audience who comment regularly.

Let’s start our end of year review with the posts that generated the most comments in 2024.

Greatest Reader Response

Posts at Hogwarts Professor do not generate a lot of feedback, curiously enough. Much of what we do get is the written equivalent of a “crank call” on the telephone; last week, for example, I was accused of being an “oligarch” dedicated to crushing the Oppressed. As a rule, I do not approve those comments.

Two posts this year, though, caused a flurry of responses and I pretty much left the floodgates open despite there being a decent amount of name-calling in the feedback. Both of these posts were about the rumor that Paapa Essiedu had been cast to play Severus Snape in Bronte Studios/HBO+ adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television. This not-yet-confirmed choice was controversial because Essiedu is a black man.

I explained in these posts why I thought this was a good idea, even brilliant given the obstacles the new shows must clear to be successful, and how the choice of Essiedu differed from John Tiffany’s decision to cast a ‘Black Hermione’ in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. With one exception, our readers disagreed and were disappointed in me for not condemning the Woke tokenism of this casting. De Gustibus.

Best Series of Posts: Pregnancy Traps

I decided in early October to write a series of posts about the Pregnancy Traps and other instances of “coercive” love that appear as plot points in Rowling’s work. I expected it would take me a week or two to write up the ten I counted in my ‘How Many?’ introductory post.

Nick Jeffery and I just finished recording a ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast on this subject that I think will be sent out to Substack subscribers later this week. The survey has taken me a lot longer to complete than I thought and the series does not yet have a proper written conclusion, in which I hope to explain how important this is for understanding Rowling’s work.

The obvious point in this regard is the quantity and the quality or centrality of Pregnancy Traps in her stories. With respect to their importance, in Rowling’s ‘Big Four’ works — Harry Potter, Casual Vacancy, Cursed Child, and the Cormoran Strike mysteries — “coercive” love in the form of a Pregnancy Trap are either the point of story-origin or the climactic event to which all the story-elements lead and at which they converge.

And the number of them! I listed ten in my ‘How Many?’ post. After reviewing the Cormoran Strike series in two posts (‘Four Strikes’ and ‘The Last Strikes’), I’d found fourteen and Nick brought up one I’d missed during our podcast. Check ’em out:

Charlotte Campbell’s pregnancy trap for Strike, her fiancée?
Marlene Higson’s trap to win Josiah Agyeman
Fenella Waldegrave’s affair with Michael Fancourt?
Mrs Laing’s pregnancy trap for “One of the Local Policemen”
Jeff Whittaker’s pregnancy trap for Leda Strike
Ornella Serafin’s pregnancy trap for Jasper Chiswell
Raphael Chiswell’s trap for Kinvara Chiswell
Lucca Ricci traps Gloria Conti via pregnancy
Sarah Shadlock’s Trapping Matt Cunliffe
Janice Beattie’s Failed Trap of Her Son’s Father
Jago Ross’ Coercive Love for Charlotte Campbell
Mazu Wace’s Pregnancy Trap for Alex Graves (and Jonathan Wace?)
Belinda (Bijou) Watkins’ Pregnancy Trap for Andrew Honbold QC (or Strike?)
Ryan Murphy’s Pregnancy Trap of Robin Ellacott, her fiancée?

There’s a lot to unpack in there — for instance, I’m intrigued by the possibility that Murphy will convince Robin to get married and try to seal the deal with a pregnancy during their engagement in parallel with what Charlotte did to Cormoran at the start of Cuckoo’s Calling (though, yes, I think Robin may be sterile) — but the sheer volume of these examples and their importance in the story-lines of each book is astonishing.

Which points to the unexplored ‘Lake’ aspect of this prevalent plot point; why does it have such a prominent place in her fiction? Nick and I discuss this in the Rowling Studies podcast coming out soon and it will be a touchstone of conversations, I think, in 2025.

Rowling Studies Podcasts

For more than twenty years, I’ve wanted to have a dedicated Hogwarts Professor podcast but it never happened. I did years in yoke to Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet shows (all of which was very pleasant, FYI) and hoped that it would be something we could do here, on our terms. Nick Jeffery has made that possible with our ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast and each of the five shows we have done in 2024 (the missing link there is the Pregnancy Trap piece about to be published) has our signature Fourth Generation focus on both Rowling’s Lake and Shed.

Speaking of which, how about the best biographically focused or ‘Lake’ posts and those more about her artistry and literary allusion, her ‘Shed’?

Rowling Biography: Lake Notes

Two of the points of emphasis that distinguish the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies from the first three are an insistence on an opera omnia or everything-she’s-written focus (rather than just Wizarding World Stories or one book, usually the latest, or the novel in queue for publication) and discussion of the connection, if any, between Rowling’s life events and core beliefs and the stories she writes. The posts above are about Rowling personally and about the connection between her life and work, the “pain to brain” aspoect of her inspiration, as she put it to Lev Grossman in 2005.

I also wrote posts about Rowling’s more open statements of what she believes and thinks. It was a year of triumph, frankly, for Rowling in her battle against Trans Rights Activists (TRAs) to protect children and adolescents from surgical mutilation and chemical castration (“Gender affirming care”) and to protect women by keeping women’s safe spaces for women only. See The Daily Wire‘s review of her take-down tweets throughout 2024: J. K. Rowling Says What Everyone is Thinking – A Year in Review. I covered a lot of that, but in the three posts above this paragraph I tried to highlight more important statements Rowling made in long form, albeit on social media.

Rowling Bibliography: Shed Notes

That being said about Hogwarts Professor’s commitment to Lake or biographical matters, we haven’t given up on her Shed artistry and its elevation of her work’s meaning from the individual exteriorization of psychological issues to the universal agonies of human existence and relationships. The four posts above confirm this weblog’s place as the online locus for conversation of Rowling’s deliberate craft choices and the effects each has on her readers, e.g., literary alchemy, ring composition, psychomachia, etc., as well as her literary and artistic influences.

I write most of the posts here at Hogwarts Professor; last year I wrote more than 150 of the 167 that went ‘up.’ Before I get to the posts that are I think are the most important of the year, the ‘take-aways’ or the answer to the question “if you could only read one 2024 HogPro post, what would it be?,” I want to highlight two other writers that contribute regularly at Hogwarts Professor.

Beatrice Groves

Dr Groves has her online archive of posts she has written and podcasts on which she has spoken, the ‘Beatrice Grove Pillar Post,‘ at Hogwarts Professor, a collection updated regularly by Nick Jeffery. She writes for a variety of Potter and Strike fandom sites in addition to this weblog but I think she shares her most challenging and interesting work, usually speculation about the next work in the Strike series in light of new twixter headers, for our page. I love the alchemical exegesis and Strike fandom loves everything she shares here.

Nick Jeffery

Nick Jeffery is the host of our Rowling Studies podcast and the Invisible Man behind many of our posts that don’t sport his name in the byline. A post I wrote up about the difference between Black Snape and Black Hermione, for example, all derived from a throw-away observation Mr Jeffery made about an interview John Tiffany made about Cursed Child‘s “Hermione-gate” in a 2017 interview.

More to the point, Nick’s area of expertise in reading J. K. Rowling is in her biography, the Lake aspects of her inspiration. He’s perfectly situated for that topic as he lives in relatively proximity to Church Cottage and his awareness of Rowling’s class concerns and perspective springs from his self-reflection on his own upbringing and place in the UK caste system, not as atrophied as many imagine. The push at Hogwarts Professor towards an integrated appreciation of Lake inspiration and Shed artistry leans largely on the insights about Rowling the person he provides (as well as his sobriety in what is necessarily a speculative field) that no one in the subject area — and I know most if not all of the better ones — can claim or have demonstrated.

Before I reveal my pick of the Most Important Hogwarts Professor Posts of 2024, I want to note that we have been posting every day since 5 August this year, Beatrice Groves’ ‘Golden Journey‘ piece. I scrolled thirty four pages of posts with five posts on average per page and noted that every three or four days in the four weeks of September into early October I’d written something substantial. It was far and away the best month of the year. For what it’s worth!

Autumn Blitz

6 September: Is J. K. Rowling a Coward? Three Topics About Which She Will Not Speak
11 September: ‘The Woman Who Walked Into Doors’ Rowling’s Favorite Contemporary Author
13 September: Rowling-Solomon Interview July 2000: Seven Possible Points of Interest in 2024
17 September: Rowling’s Soul Triptych Psychomachia: Is It From Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’?
21 September: J. K. Rowling’s ‘G-Spot’ and ‘Triple Play:’ The Lake & Shed Secret of Her Success
24 September: Is Rowling ‘Spiritual Not Religious’?
28 September: Rowling’s ‘Critical Biography:’ Three Suggestions for Who Should Write It
3 October: Rowling Twixter Fish and Strike Update

Best in Show

The most popular posts we have here, oddly enough, are those about films or television shows. I say that this is odd because the focus of the weblog is on interpretation of Rowling’s works’ artistry and meaning, her written texts, not the adaptations for large and small screens. A lot of our readers (and those prompted by news aggregators for Rowling stories), it seems, stop by on days of important film or teevee news to see what we have to say. Fair enough.

I think the important work we are doing here, as I’ve said how many times above? I’ve lost count, is the push into the Fourth Generation of Rowling studies, in which we talk about her work in the context of all her writing and integrating at the author’s repeated insistenceinto that interpretation the probable biographical sources of inspiration.

It’s no surprise, then, that my choice for best post and best podcast of 2024 are each simultaneously introductions to and moving-the-ball-forward efforts in Fourth Generation work. The post identifies what I think is Rowling’s signature point of Genius (or ‘G-Spot’) as an artist and the podcast with host Nick Jeffery discusses a Q&A Rowling made called ‘On Writing.’ Both integrate Lake and Shed knowledge and perspective on Rowling’s work and challenge the reader or podcast listener to break out of the one series or next work pre-occupation.

Thank you for joining me on this End of Year Review, and, in advance, for sharing your favorites from Hogwarts Professor in 2024. The HogPro faculty and I thank you for your attentive reading and for the comments you share on what we have written!