An enchanting opportunity: magic lover to study in England

HALIFAX — It’s not quite an acceptance letter to Hogwarts, but for Samuel Gillis Hogan, it’s the next best thing.

After a lifelong passion for the supernatural, Gillis Hogan of Wolfville, N.S., has been awarded a prestigious fellowship to study the history of magic at an English university.

As this year’s recipient of the Rothermere Fellowship — valued at roughly $29,000 per year for living expenses, plus university and travel fees — Gillis Hogan will be heading to the University of Exeter in September to pursue a PhD in the bewitching subject.

“I’m pretty over the moon about it all,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s marvellous.”

Gillis Hogan’s fascination with magic started young: every book, TV show and movie he liked as a child had some sort of magical element to it, he said.

“Children always loved magic, but they never loved it quite to the obsessive degree that I did,” he chuckled, noting that the success of the Harry Potter franchise helped him realize he wasn’t the only one interested in the topic.

His love of magic carried him throughout his school career: he wrote an honours thesis on spirit summoning during his undergraduate degree in history and medieval studies at Memorial University in N.L., and defended a thesis on chiromancy — the medieval precursor to modernday palm reading — while completing his master’s degree at the University of Saskatchewan.

At the University of Exeter, Gillis Hogan will study late medieval and early modern manuscripts containing instructions on how to summon fairy spirits: a subject which he said doesn’t get a lot of attention in the world of magic academia.