From the journeys of Harry Potter and a handful of Hobbits to the locales of William Faulkner andForbidden Planet,West Virginia Universitys 30th Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film this month books passage for all things imaginary.

Imaginary Places in Literature and Filmis the theme of the 30 th annual colloquium, Sept. 15-17, in the Mountainlair student union on the Downtown Campus.

Were going to explore neighborhoods and whole universes that were born in the brains of writers and film directors,said Dr. Armand Singer, the professor emeritus of foreign languages who is coordinating the colloquium.

All these environments are the products of imagination, yet theyre as real as can be to us as readers and viewers,said Singer, who has coordinated around 15 of the gatherings since the colloquiums founding in 1975.Were going to pay our respects to that process.

The keynote address,”Paradise Imagined,”will be offered at 7 p.m. Sept. 16 by Hart Wegner, professor of German, Comparative Literature and Film at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Dr. Wegner founded the Department of Film at UNLV , which he chairs, and is one of the nation’s leading champions of the study of film as an independent academic discipline. He has hosted three public television series dealing with the world of film, has published extensively in a variety of genres, and has received numerous awards and honors for his work.

He also founded the Research Center for American Film, which holds the Chuck Jones Collection of Animation Art and the Howard R. Hughes Film Archive.

The three-day colloquium also includes a screening of the science fiction cult film classics,Forbidden Planet,along with detailed discussions of imagined landscapes in country-western music, the Mississippi of William Faulkners mind and the imagery employed in J.K. RowlingsHarry Potterbooks.

Around 100 writers, thinkers and scholars from around the globe are expected to consider the imaginary placeds created by filmmakers and writers.

WVU s Department of Foreign Languages is sponsoring the colloquium, along with the Department of English and Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

The gathering is free and open to the public.

A full schedule of Colloquium presentations and activities, most of which will be held at the Mountainlair, is available on-line athttp://www.as.wvu.edu/forlang/colloq/Colloquium%20Program%202005.pdf

For more information, contact Dr. Singer at WVUCOLL @mail.wvu.edu or by telephone at 304-293-5121.