Profs & Pints Denver: An Encounter with Folklore’s Undead

Profs and Pints Denver presents: “An Encounter with Folklore’s Undead,” your chance to become familiar with revenants, vampires, and other not-quite-deceased figures thought to prowl northern and eastern Europe, with Vicki Jean Grove, teaching professor emerita in Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Colorado-Boulder and scholar of the fantastic and supernatural in such cultures.

[Doors open at 5 pm and the talk begins at 6:30. Advance tickets $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/denver-undead . ]

Come to Woodie Fisher Kitchen & Bar near Denver’s Union Station to give your brain a Halloween treat: A deep dig into folkloric tales of the undead and how such beliefs arose.

The event marks the Denver debut of Profs and Pints, a social enterprise that has earned considerable followings in more than a dozen American cities by staging affordable ticketed scholarly talks in bars, brewpubs, and other welcoming venues.

The speaker, Dr. Vicki Jean Grove, is distinctly familiar with the undead. After writing her dissertation on the vampire in Russian literature she embarked on a scholarly career in which her research focused on belief in various undead figures. She has taught a class at UC-Boulder titled “Death and the Undead in Slavic and Nordic Cultures.”

You’ll learn how, long before they became box-office attractions, vampires, revenants, and other undead figures were seen as very real threats. So strong was belief in them that, in addition to being feared, they were thought to play important roles in the communities to which they’d returned.

We’ll look at the purpose that belief in vampires and other revenants served in pre-modern times and what people were thought to be predisposed to “restlessness” after death. We’ll explore both literary and scientific documentation of experiences, encounters, and evidence of the undead, and we’ll examine both scholarly and archaeological evidence validating or debunking belief that the “restless” dead existed. Among the sources cited will be literary references from medieval Icelandic sagas, 18th-century documentation by respected authorities, and contemporary archaeological discoveries.

Dr. Grove will discuss how modern representations of the revenant, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the zombies in The Walking Dead, compare to the old popular beliefs, and she’ll tackle the question of why the undead continue to live on in the popular imagination.

At Woodie Fisher Kitchen & Bar, small dishes, craft cocktails, and draft beers await. You might want to order something with garlic. (Doors: $17, or $15 with student ID.)

Image: An undead person rises from the grave in a drawing from about 1500 (public domain / Wikimedia).