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: A Campy Summer Evening
Fait la Force Brewing, 1414 3rd Ave S St101, Nashville, TN, USProfs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Campy Summer Evening,” on a distinct style and its history, politics, and pleasures, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State University and scholar of film, television, and media.
[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/campy-summer-evening ]
When something is called “campy,” what does that mean? What exactly is camp style, and why does it remain so culturally provocative?
Throw on something outlandish and come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to hear answers delivered by Stephanie Graves, whose past talks have earned her a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans.
She’ll look at camp in film, television, fashion, music, and popular culture, moving from Oscar Wilde to Trixie Mattel, from classic Hollywood melodrama to contemporary internet memes.
In defining camp, she’ll describe its association with excess, drama, irony, and artifice. She’ll discuss how it’s evoked in the play with gender and sexuality in Rocky Horror Picture Show, in the visual excess and exaggerated style of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and in art as varied as Wilde’s plays and Lady Gaga’s concerts.
We’ll look at how camp thrives in the spaces where “good” and “bad” taste and “high” and “low” art collapse into one another, such as in John Waters’s Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, in RuPaul’s Drag Race, and in the films of Baz Luhrmann. More than just an aesthetic of flamboyance or kitsch, camp emphasizes stylization, performance, and spectacle in ways that deliberately provoke cultural norms of respectability and decorum.
You’ll learn how the tenets of camp were widely popularized by writer Susan Sontag in her influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” In reality, however, camp’s history stretches back much further, emerging from queer subcultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flourishing in spaces where humor, performance, parody, and coded self-expression became tools of survival for marginalized communities. It was carried forward in the glamour of old Hollywood stars, the theatricality of disco and drag culture, the hyper-femininity of contemporary pop icons, and in the pleasures of cult films and television.
We’ll consider why camp continues to resonate—and why exaggeration, artifice, and “bad taste” still carries surprising cultural power. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
Image by Canva.
4 attendees
Past events
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