What we’re about
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 (2)
See all- Profs & Pints Nashville: Sex and the Horror FilmFait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Sex and the Horror Film,” with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University, scholar of horror, and co-author of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Hell's Under New Management.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/sex-and-horror/ .]
Sex and Horror have been enthusiastic—and often messy—bedfellows since the earliest days of both literature and cinema. Come hear that complicated relationship explored by film and media scholar Stephanie Graves, whose research focuses primarily on Horror and the Southern Gothic and who teaches classes on Horror, popular culture, and film adaptation.
She’ll discuss how Horror and sex both center on the corporeal body and are sources of fear and anxiety. Since Horror explores the human body’s many vulnerabilities, it is considered a “body genre” for the often-visceral affect it elicits.
Graves will trace the contours of the relationship between sex and Horror throughout cinema history. We will consider how sex manifests in Horror’s many subgenres—monster movies, slasher films, psychological thrillers, the Gothic, and more—and what it means within each narrative mode.
Along the way, we’ll look at the moral outrage that sex and Horror so often provoke, such as the combination of the two being condemned with pejorative labels such as “gornography” and “torture porn.” We’ll consider what sociological role is played and what cultural value is offered by sex in Horror films.
We’ll consider the place of sex in contemporary Horror and look at how we’ve gotten where we are, tackling questions such as: How has the relationship between sex and Horror shifted over the years? Why exactly is there is much sex in the Horror genre? And what happened to all the shower scenes?
It will be a scary, sexy evening. (Talk includes mature subject matter. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image by GoodFon.
- Profs & Pints Nashville: A Trip to HellFait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Trip to Hell,” on tales and visions of the Underworld and how to get there, with Cory Thomas Hutcheson, folklorist, lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University, and author of New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/hell/ .]
As Halloween approaches, Profs and Pints tempts Nashville with the hottest ticket in town: A dark tour of gateways to the Underworld in folklore, narratives, myths, and popular culture.
Your guide, folklorist Cory Hutcheson, will discuss the evolution of our collective concept of the Underworld and Hell as relayed through various stories from ancient to contemporary. Steel yourself, because he’ll also tell you how to get there.
Among the paths you’ll learn about: A theme park in Singapore where you can visit not just one hell, but the Ten Hells of Chinese folklore; the Matapan cave system of Greece’s Cape Tainaron, through which both Odysseus and Orpheus were thought to have traveled to Hades; the “Seven Gates of Hell” that, according to urban legend, exist in York, Pennsylvania.
You’ll be duly warned of the creatures that guard the gateways into darkness and gloom, you’ll hear tales of questing heroes who conquered otherworldly fears to get there, and you’ll find out whether there’s any way back out once you’ve made your way in.
Among the questions we’ll discuss on the way: Why does Hell fascinate us so much? What motivates people to do something as terrifying as trying to get there on their own? And is the town that’s the birthplace of the York Peppermint Pattie really a place to fear? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The “Door to Hell,” a crater in Turkmenistan where natural gas has been getting burned off since a 1971. (Photo by Flydime / Wikimedia Commons.)
