Harry sat down in his easy chair with the latest copy of Accio Squid, the alumni magazine started three years earlier by Susan Bones. It published twice a year, and reading it always took him back. He opened straight to the cover story, a feature profiling the new Muggle Studies professor...
Can Muggles Improve Wizarding Life? Professor Dennis Creevey Thinks So!
As disappointed as the entire Hogwarts community was to hear that Arthur Weasley was retiring from his post as Professor of Muggle Studies after over a decade of service, Arthur himself gives his successor the heartiest of recommendations.
"I've known Dennis since he was a NEWT-level student," Arthur tells us, "Of course, I'd heard the name before - he and his brother were in school with some of my own children, all in Gryffindor together. I gave up my post at the Ministry to come teach just after my youngest graduated and left home, and she was two years above Dennis. So he was a sixth year when I got there, and intensely interested in Muggle Studies. Easily the best student in his year, one of the top few I've taught in the twelve years I've been here. Delivered solid Os on both the OWLs and the NEWTs. The muggleborns always have a bit of an advantage early on, but to keep getting top marks beyond your OWL year really takes a deep understanding not just of how Muggle society functions, but its relationship to wizarding society both historically and today. And I'm not sure I've had a single student more fascinated by those relationships than Dennis Creevey - his enthusiasm will infect his own students, I'm sure."
Professor Creevey was born to muggle parents, but his Hogwarts letter did not come entirely as a surprise. His older brother, Colin, had received one two years before. All reports indicate that Colin showed quite as much promise in the subject as his younger brother, though his family indicates that his dearest ambition was to become a photojournalist for the Daily Prophet. Sadly, none of this potential was to be fulfilled - at the tender age of sixteen, Colin gave his life fighting in the Battle of Hogwarts. Dennis had idolized his brother; as deeply as the loss affected him, though, he understood why Colin had been willing to give his life to the anti-Voldemort cause. They and many of their muggleborn friends had suffered persecution that year, and a muggle family close to the Creeveys had been killed in one of the many Voldemort-orchestrated building collapses.
In fact, Professor Creevey describes Colin's death as a galvanizing moment in his life: "I'd grown up with muggles, they were my family, my friends. I'd known nothing but muggles for longer than I'd been at Hogwarts. I realized that as long as wizard society was content to merely exist beside them, not to truly value them or try to learn from them, there would always be undercurrents of wizarding superiority of the type that led to the Battle and so many other dark moments in our history." As soon as he graduated, Dennis made it his goal to address this issue.
"Even those wizards who had no hatred of muggles whatsoever rarely regarded them as our true equals," he clams, "Many wizards to this day pity them, or see them as quaint throwbacks or oddities. Professor Weasley was the first wizard I'd met who truly took to heart the fact that while our magic may be beyond the comprehension of any muggle, they have accomplished just as many things that would befuddle the average wizard."
In what many would see as a risky, even ludicrous move, upon graduation from Hogwarts Dennis enrolled in classes at a muggle technical college. He moved back in with his parents, and lived as a muggle for nearly two years. He kept a subscription to the Prophet and exchanged owls with a few school friends, but kept his wand locked away and had no other contact with the wizarding world. He spent his time reconnecting with his muggle family and friends, and studying a form of muggle technology known as "computers." Computers were to become a central focus of his career, inspiring many of his innovations and inventions over the next few years.