Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Forgeries Throughout History,” on famous fakes and their real impact, with Vanessa R. Corcoran, Catholic Church and medieval historian and director of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-forgeries-throughout-history .]

Today people often discuss fraud and forgery as if they are uniquely modern problems—the products of the internet, artificial intelligence, and the rise of deepfakes. But the impulse to deceive by fabricating evidence, identities, or images is far older than any digital technology. Moreover, even those who did not get away with it for long sometimes altered the course of history with their trickery.

Learn in depth about such deceptions during an evening of mythmaking and myth-busting with Dr. Vanessa R. Corcoran, previously has given excellent Profs and Pints on Catholic history and culture and the 2025 papal conclave.

She’ll walk you through a series of forgeries tied to the Crusades, the Catholic Church, and the Byzantine Empire, especially focusing on fakery that confounded the medieval world. You’ll learn about cases involving forged documents, imitated signatures, counterfeited money, bogus works of art, and imposters in disguise.

We’ll look at how Roman artists in antiquity created sculptures that they attempted to pass off as Greek works to increase marketability. (Even Michelangelo was guilty of trying to disguise one of his sculptures as a work from the classical era.) Later on, Dutch painter Han Van Meegeren created numerous forgeries of Vermeer’s paintings, ultimately getting convicted of fraud and forgery.

Among acts of deception that changed the course of history was a medieval forgery titled “The Donation of Constantine,” which as of the late 700s was used to buttress claims that the fourth-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine I had transferred authority over Rome to the Pope. It was viewed as authentic until fifteenth-century Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla debunked it as created centuries after Constantine died.

A popular legend in the Catholic Church held that a woman later known as “Pope Joan” disguised herself as a man and ruled as “popess” in the ninth century. That narrative, largely debunked by modern historians, was treated by medieval chronicles as credible and used to buttress arguments that women should be ordained as priests.

Among other cases we’ll examine include the Shroud of Turin, purported to be the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, which was denounced as forgery as early as 1389 but remains venerated as a relic by some believers.

Dr. Corcoran’s talk will offer an important lens for understanding the challenges and stakes of today’s debates over AI-generated fakery. You’ll walk away with an appreciation of how every generation has had to learn, often painfully, how to distinguish what merely looks authentic from what actually is. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Customers at a 1984 art and antiques fair examine a Han van Meegeren fake of a Vermeer. (Photo by Rob C. Croes, National Archives of the Netherlands.)

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “The Victorians' Sexual Underworld,” on sex workers and queer communities in nineteenth century cities, with Andrew Israel Ross, associate professor and chair of history at Loyola University Maryland and author or editor of several books and articles on the history of prostitution, homosexuality, and policing in nineteenth century Paris.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-victorians-sexual-underworld .]

We are living through a moral panic about the presence of sexual and gender diversity in our society, as evidenced by attacks on Pride month, calls to ban drag queen story hours, and governmental efforts to redefine sex and gender. Underlying such actions is a sense that the increasing prominence of queer and trans people in American society represents something new and unexpected, a deviation from a clear history of heterosexual and gender stability.

The reality, however, is that queer life—and sexual life broadly—used to be much more central to social life than it is today, especially in growing cities during the Industrial Revolution.

Come to Arlington’s Highline RxR beer hall to gain an eye-opening understanding of the history of sexual communities often seen as marginal in history–female sex workers, gay men and lesbians, and transgender people.

Dr. Andrew Ross, a historian of sexuality, will explain why public sex was so important to nineteenth century urban culture and how Victorians wrestled with evidence of sexual and gender diversity. Drawing from his intensive study of the history of Paris but also from research on London, Berlin, and New York during the Industrial Age, he’ll discuss the sexual ideology of the Victorians and how it gave substantial opportunities to people who faced a great deal of discrimination then and continue to face it now.

You’ll learn about the practice “regulationism,” which sought to manage the business of sex work so that heterosexual men could always have access to sex.

Then we’ll look at the queer male world – one that often intersected with that of female prostitutes – and the spaces where men found one another quite publicly. Dr. Ross will discuss the emergence of the first gay bars, which were opened (perhaps surprisingly) by women, and talk about how people who did not identify as either men or women navigated this world.

What happened to these cultures? The talk will conclude by focusing on a period between the World Wars characterized by incredible experimentation with sexual identity, community building and politics. We’ll look at how it came to an end with the rise of the Nazis in Europe and the Red Scare in the United States. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, a gay couple in Victorian England who cross-dressed as Fanny and Stella, in an 1869 photo by Frederick Spalding (Wikimedia Commons).

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Travel Like an Anthropologist,” an exploration of the cultural complexities of tourism and a guide to ensuring your visits to other places benefit all involved, with Melissa A. Stevens, principal at CultureSnap Consulting and adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Delaware.

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

Mark Twain once famously remarked that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Indeed, it can open our minds to new ideas and possibilities, positively contribute to local communities, and help us establish lasting relationships with people across the world.

At the same time, however, our travels can be harmful to the people and places we visit and to our world as a whole. We can end up exploiting vulnerable populations, worsening global and local inequalities, accelerating climate change, and forever altering the places and cultures that we visit.

How are responsible tourists supposed to navigate these contradictions without ruining their vacation?

Explore the cultural complexities of what it means to travel, and find ways to ensure your conscience rests easy after full travel days, with the help of cultural anthropologist Melissa Stevens.

She’ll start by discussing how her own field has not always been a positive force in other parts of the world, and historically has committed some of the same sins as the tourism marketing industry when it comes to shaping Western perceptions of Non-Western cultures. Popular anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon contributed to the “exotification” and exploitation of indigenous peoples and local communities in ways that cast a shadow on their work.

In confronting the ethical implications of its early history, anthropology developed a perspective known as “cultural relativism,” which called upon anthropologists to build awareness of their own cultural assumptions as a means to engage more ethically and responsibly with the people and places they visited. Anyone, including tourists, can learn to have a culturally relativist mindset in their travels.

Dr. Stevens will discuss how anthropologists use cultural relativism to gain a deeper understanding of people and places. She’ll also talk about how anthropologists look at tourism through a cultural lens, diving into the politics of representation, of performance, and of authenticity, and also examining gendered experiences of tourism. We'll take a tour through the history of travel, from early pilgrims to digital nomads, and we’ll explore different types of tourism, including cultural tourism, ecotourism, sex and romance tourism, dark tourism, backpacking, and “voluntourism.”

We’ll consider the environmental and cultural impacts of tourism on tourist destinations. Drawing from her experiences conducting ethnographic research on cultural and sustainable tourism in Tanzania and Vietnam, Dr. Stevens will share immersive stories about what she learned in researching how tourism was perceived and experienced by the people who live with it.

What you learn at her talk will help ensure that you keep learning every time you pack your bags. (Doors: $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: “Preventing Election Violence,” on the recent history of election-related terrorism and the potential for violence before, during, and after the midterms, with Jacob Ware, adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and scholar of domestic and international terrorism.

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

The United States has been plagued by election violence over the past several years, with recent incidents including the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the attempted 2024 assassination of Donald Trump during an open-air campaign rally.

But the historical record indicates that such election violence is not an aberration. American elections have been undermined by terrorism and political violence since the nation’s founding. We should therefore not be surprised if violence again mars the upcoming 2026 midterms.

Join terrorism expert Jacob Ware, coauthor of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, for an in-depth look at past and potential election-related violence.

He’ll examine the violence of election cycles in the Trump era, including assassination attempts during candidate campaigning, voter intimidation on Election Day, and attempts to forcefully affect vote-counting in the days and weeks after the vote itself.

He’ll cover the spectrum of domestic and homegrown terrorist actors, including longstanding Salafi-jihadist adversaries as well as far-right extremists and far-left extremists, and draw on various data sources to assess which actors will pose the gravest threat of violence around the 2026 midterms.

His talk will conclude with a set of practical recommendations that both government and citizens can follow to try to ensure peace during the election and any eventual transfer of power. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop the certification of 2020 election results. (Photo by Tyler Merbler / Creative Commons.)