Professor Edmund M. Kern is a history professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he teaches a course called Thinking About Harry Potter. He’s also the author of The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us About Moral Choices (Prometheus Books), which grew out of an essay published as “Harry Potter, Stoic Boy Wonder” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Professor Kern received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from the University of Minnesota. His essays and reviews on the history of witchcraft and religious culture have appeared in numerous periodicals, anthologies, and encyclopedias. He has also served as a media consultant on witchcraft and witch-hunting, historical and modern paganism, and the roots of Halloween—not to mention Harry Potter.