About us
Profs and Pints brings professors and other college instructors into bars, cafes, and other venues to give fascinating talks or to conduct instructive workshops. They cover a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, popular culture, horticulture, literature, creative writing, and personal finance. Anyone interested in learning and in meeting people with similar interests should join. Lectures are structured to allow at least a half hour for questions and an additional hour for audience members to meet each other. Admission to Profs and Pints events requires the purchase of tickets, either in advance (through the ticket link provided in event descriptions) or at the door to the venue. Many events sell out in advance. Your indication on Meetup of your intent to attend an event constitutes neither a reservation nor payment for that event.
Although Profs and Pints has a social mission--expanding access to higher learning while offering college instructors a new income source--it is NOT a 501c3. It was established as a for-profit company in hopes that, by developing a profitable business model, it would be able to spread to other communities much more quickly than a nonprofit dependent on philanthropic support. That said, it is welcoming partners and collaborators as it seeks to build up audiences and spread to new cities. For more information email profsandpints@hotmail.com.
Thank you for your interest in Profs and Pints.
Regards,
Peter Schmidt, Founder, Profs and PInts
Upcoming events
1
Profs & Pints Nashville: The Rise of the Skull Readers
Fait la Force Brewing, 1414 3rd Ave S St101, Nashville, TN, USProfs and Pints Nashville presents: “The Rise of the Skull Readers,” on how the pseudoscience of phrenology became a force in American life, with Paul Stob, scholar of the history of ideas in America, director of Vanderbilt University’s Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership, and author of Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind.
[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-skull-readers ]
The nineteenth century saw the emergence of phrenology, a newly discovered “science” premised on a simple yet revolutionary idea: The bumps on your head mirror those on your brain and serve as the keys to understanding your past, present, and future.
Today we generally hear phrenology described as a racist pseudoscience or used as a punchline in discussions of silly ideas of the past. Such dismissals, however, downplay the tremendous role phrenology played in its heyday’s intellectual discussions and blind us to how much it was seen as a force for positive change.
The reality is that phrenology’s leading proponents influenced some of the most significant reforms in American history, including abolitionism, women’s suffrage, public education, temperance, and the greater embrace of democracy. They also garnered the support of many prominent Americans—including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman—all of whom embraced phrenology as a science of liberation and hope.
Help your brain absorb a deep understanding of phrenology by coming to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom for this talk by Paul Stob, a professor of communication studies who has written extensively on quirky aspects of American life, including new sciences and reform efforts.
He’ll especially focus on how a single family, the siblings Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte Fowler, played an outsized role in phrenology’s rise. Spreading a message of hope in the decades before the Civil War, they preached a scientific gospel perfectly fitted to the problems and possibilities of a growing nation. From the displays at their popular Phrenological Cabinet in New York to their lectures across the country to the thousands of books and periodicals they shipped to their followers every month, they built an empire that touched almost all aspects of American society.
Professor Stob will explain phrenology through captivating imagery and hands-on visual aids. If you are brave enough you can receive your own free phrenology exam—just as millions of Americans did in the nineteenth century. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
Image: Porcelain phrenology head busts for sale in Clearwater, Florida (Photo by Justin Waters / Creative Commons.)
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Past events
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