Wring your hands in jealousy, Potter fans. There is a new module on offer at Durham University, created in response to demand from the student body: ‘Harry Potter and the Age of Illusion’. As part of a BA in Education Studies, undergraduates can opt for a course which promises ‘to place the phenomenon that is Harry Potter ™ in its social, cultural and educational context'.  Themes explored will include ‘the commodification of education’ and ‘the moral universe of the school: J.K. Rowling and the legacy of the school story from Rudyard Kipling to Grange Hill’. University registrar Carolyn Fowler has called it ‘a serious but innovative’ module; certainly, if the Learning Outcomes (including ‘an ability to problematise reality as a social construct’) are anything to go by. And the bad news: the module will involve 22 lectures, 11 seminars, a total of 167 hours of reading…and a 2 hour exam.

One Durham student currently taking the course said, "Mock all you want, it’s actually quite challenging. The novelty of studying Harry Potter wears off after about two weeks." Another was more upbeat, emphasising that "it’s pretty cool to get to re-read the Harry Potter books and call it work". This may be, according to Durham, "the first, or among the first, module of its kind in a UK university", the States have been on the Harry-Potter-academia bandwagon for much longer.

Frostburg State University, to take one example,  offers a course entitled ‘The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works’, which claims to explain magical events through the basic principles of physics. My personal favourite is Oregon State University’s program, ‘Finding Your Patronus’, which examines what Martin Luther King Jr. and Albus Dumbledore have in common as part of the induction process for Freshmen. These courses use the popularity of the novels as a way of engaging student interest for more ‘serious’ academic topics – to sweeten the bitter pill of philosophy or physics, teaching essentially traditional topics through an Potter-focused lens.

But do the novels merit consideration as an object of study in themselves? If a university as prestigious as Stanford thinks it worthwhile to offer a course, ‘Harry Potter: The Meaning Behind the Magic’, which examines the novels as literature, their impact, influences, and reception, the answer seems to be a decided yes. From a literary perspective, the series is fascinating because it is a patchwork of so many different influences: boarding school novels, quest plot archetypes, medieval romances, Homeric heroism, and myriad mythologies. Epic in length and (arguably) scope, the novels weave all this material into one cohesive whole, an utterly compelling alternate world that lies just beyond the barrier at King’s Cross. As one student at King’s College London – who wrote a coursework essay on the reception of classical ideas in the Potter novels – said, "it wasn’t just about writing an essay on wizards, it was about the influences and mixing of different mythologies, cultures, and histories".

If you’re feeling jealous of those Durham students, with their shiny new Potter module and glow of academic innovation, never fear. When it comes to the taking contemporary culture seriously, Cambridge is not lagging behind. Last year, candidates for the contemporary literature paper in Part II of the English Tripos were invited to comment on a passage which analysed the Twilight novels as "crypto-Mormon propaganda that takes delight in the pleasure of half-naked teenage boys". And the Education Faculty Library can always promise the delight of a book entitled Media and the make-believe worlds of children: when Harry Potter meets Pokemon in Disneyland.

For all that this invites gentle mockery, I would argue that anyone who can’t see the intellectual importance of this kind of study is seriously lacking in open-mindedness. And, worse, risks comparison with Voldemort, who, Dumbledore tells Harry, does not understand or value "children’s tales, of love, loyalty and innocence" which have "a power beyond the reach of any magic". The enduring popularity of the novels testifies to their imaginative power: defending the new module, Dr Martin Richardson, course leader for Education Studies at Durham argued that "the point of the Potterverse, and by extension the magical module, is that it has the potential to shine a light on our own world". And who better to comment on these texts than the generation whose progress to adulthood, whose very view of the world, has been so profoundly shaped by them?