Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints DC presents: “A Scientific Plunge into Ocean Movies,” a marine biologist’s fact-check of Jaws and other films set in the sea, with Chris Parsons, associate professor in the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter University and former director of the environmental science program at George Mason University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-ocean-movies .]

The underwater environment has long been a setting in science-fiction and fantasy movies as well as thrillers like Jaws. But how well do the premises underlying such films fare when subjected to deep scientific scrutiny?

Join Chris Parsons, a science podcaster and marine-life expert who has given excellent Profs and Pints talks based on his research, for an informative and often-amusing look at how well various ocean movies hold up when we peer beneath their surface at what’s known about water and aquatic life. He’ll look at where they got the science right as well as where they got it very, very wrong, and how what they portray compares to the actual observations and experiences of people who have worked (and even lived) underwater.

If you have ever contemplated how fast Aquaman actually might be able to swim or wondered how many humpback whales could fit into a Klingon spaceship, this talk is for you.

We’ll go back 150 years to look at Jules Verne’s science-fiction classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas as well as the 1954 Disney film based on it. You’ll learn how Verne took care to base much of his novel on fact and proved somewhat prescient in his predictions related to ocean science, but also made assertions that don’t hold water.

From there we’ll dive into movies such as Aquaman, The Abyss, Underwater, Avatar 2, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, harpooning their scientific fallacies while giving them credit for scientific truth where it’s due. We’ll talk about the actual size of prehistoric Megalodons like the one depicted in The Meg and whether huge sharks possibly could lurk in the Mariana Trench.

Interested in learning about all of the scientific flaws in Jaws, now 50 years old? Chief Brody would say, “We’re going to need a bigger beer.” (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From a poster advertising the 1907 silent film Under the Seas, a Georges Méliès parody of Jules Verne’s classic novel.

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Cinderella’s Story,” on the origins and evolution of a fairytale heroine and cultural icon, with Kitty Maynard, former professor of French at Washington College, director of the Faculty Hub at the University of Richmond, and scholar of early modern France.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-cinderella-story .]

Cinderella is arguably the most famous fairy tale of our time, its elements feeling so familiar that they seem to express universal experiences and human values. But while Cinderella might seem timeless, the version of her known to us today has a very specific origin in seventeenth-century France and the political climate of that time. Moreover, she has changed dramatically over the centuries to appeal to new audiences.

Get to know the plucky young heroine whose tale has become part of our everyday culture and language by coming to Profs and Pints at Crooked Run Fermentation, where lifelong learners have a ball.

Dr. Kitty Maynard will take us back to the court of Louis XIV, where courtier Charles Perrault wrote Cinderella in 1697 to offer real lessons to a real audience consisting of fellow courtiers rather than children. You’ll learn how French society at that time had a particular version of social mobility in which its aristocratic structure allowed the advancement of meritorious and industrious male members of the bourgeoisie but limited female agency to marriage.

We’ll look at how one of Perrault's contemporaries, Madame d'Aulnoy, came up with a very different take on a Cinderella story, in which Cinderella found her man and symbolically proposed to him. We’ll touch upon the Brothers Grimm's dark version of the tale and discuss how Cinderella has been pliable enough to stretch into other eras because basic tropes in her story appeal to our love of underdogs and sense of justice.

When Walt Disney brought Cinderella to the screen in 1950, he transformed Perrault’s version dramatically to reflect the ideals and expectations of a postwar American audience and the ethos of the American Dream. You’ll get to know the Disneyfied version of her, as well as those in Dina Goldstein's “Fallen Princesses” photo series and in a smattering of recent remakes of Cinderella such as Ever After, the live-action Cinderella, and comedic takes like Cinderfella.

Among the questions Dr. Maynard will tackle: Where does Cinderella really come from? And what makes her story so compelling to us today?
Don’t worry. The talk will end long before midnight. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From an Elizabeth Tyler Wolcott illustration of Cinderella from about 1920.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Kafka and Prague,” on how a great author and his works were shaped by the history, culture, and landscape of a city, with Cynthia Paces, professor of history at The College of New Jersey, teacher of courses on European history and Holocaust studies, and author of two books on Prague.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-kafka .]

Where we’re from can profoundly shape how we think, what we create, and what we end up doing with our lives. Gain a much deeper understanding of Franz Kafka, the acclaimed and influential author whose prophetic work anticipated European totalitarianism and still shapes dystopian visions, through a talk examining Kafka’s relationship with the city of Prague and those who lived there.

Your guide on this scholarly journey, Professor Cynthia Paces, has lived and worked in Prague and is the author of Prague: The Heart of Europe and Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century. She has extensively researched how Kafka, a German-Jewish writer, came to symbolize the capital of the Czech Republic.

We’ll start by looking at how Kafka’s worldview was influenced by his childhood in Prague’s Old Town during a time when the city was rapidly expanding and industrializing and shifting from being a primarily German-speaking place to being the center of Czech nationalism and culture. Born in 1883 only steps away from the city’s former Jewish Ghetto, as a boy Kafka watched the destruction of the Jewish Quarter during an urban sanitation project. The event profoundly affected him, prompting him to later remark: “We walk through the broad streets of the newly built town” but “inside we tremble just as before in the ancient streets of our misery.”

Professor Paces will discuss Kafka’s relationship to Prague’s rich Jewish heritage, considering how he was influenced by the legacy of the Talmudic scholar Rabbi Loew and by folklore telling of the Golem of Prague, a terrifying monster that Loew was said to have shaped from clay and given life. She’ll describe Kafka’s love for the Yiddish Theater and his involvement with the Prague Circle, a group of German-Jewish intellectuals including Albert Einstein and the author Max Brod.

We’ll explore the tensions between Kafka’s creative endeavors and his work as a bureaucrat during Prague’s rapid modernization in the early twentieth century. You'll learn about the Prague homes where he resided and cafés where he socialized.

Although Prague place names appear in only one Kafka story, the city shaped his fiction. The claustrophobic or ominous settings of works like The Metamorphosis and The Castle recall Prague’s labyrinthine streets, modern office buildings, and looming castle. We’ll listen for echoes of Prague’s landscape and landmarks in Kafka’s writings and end by exploring Kafka’s afterlife as a cultural icon of post-Communist Prague. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Life of Frankenstein,” on the birth, evolution and impact of a tale of man-made monstrosity, with Bernard Welt, an emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University who frequently lectures on Frankenstein in literature, cinema, and culture.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-life-of-frankenstein .]

Guillermo del Toro’s lush and lovingly produced film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is just the latest of many iterations of the story to capture the public’s imagination. People have watched Victor Frankenstein give life to his monster in numerous films, on television, and on stage, and even perform “Putting on the Ritz” with him thanks to the comic genius of Mel Brooks.

Mary Shelley did not just tell a tale. She spawned the modern genre of speculative fiction and gave rise to a myth that would crop up in debates over nature versus nurture and other matters. Even today it stokes anxieties over the potential impacts of robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, by evoking the image of a monster turning on its progenitor.

Come gain a new appreciation of Mary Shelley’s creation with the help of Dr. Bernard Welt, who has studied the relationship between nightmares and the horror genre and is the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art.

Dr. Welt will start by telling a literary origin story almost as famous as Frankenstein itself, of how an 18-year-old, then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, started writing Frankenstein in 1816 while staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with two of her era’s leading poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover. Housebound by foul weather, the three read Gothic tales of ghosts and monsters and challenged each other to produce something even more terrifying. Mary dreamed up a story of a man who defied death by creating a living being out of scraps of deceased men harvested from graveyards and anatomy labs.

The resulting novel, Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818, would by that century’s end become a touchstone in philosophical discourse on the nature of humanity and in political discussions of imperialism and populism. By the 21st century, Mary Shelley (as she became) had earned a more significant place in the literary canon than either her husband or Lord Byron.

We will examine how this grisly tale became a landmark of modern thought and look at the part played by numerous film adaptations from the first years of cinema to the present day. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From a Theodor von Holst engraving in an 1831 edition of Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley of London.