Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “America's Revolution as a World Revolution,” an electrifying global history of a not-so-local war, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of the new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-world-revolution ]

When we think of the American Revolution, we often picture a parochial drama: thirteen colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth—and perhaps not even the most interesting half.

Join historian and author Richard Bell for an evening in which you’ll rediscover the Revolution as a world war, one that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents.

You’ll learn how, from the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty—and for empire.

Professor Bell, whose many excellent previous talks have earned him a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans, will trace the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. You’ll encounter a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign army, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home.

Along the way, Dr. Bell will explore how the Revolution stirred a transoceanic refugee crisis, ignited antislavery activism, and inspired uprisings from Ireland to India. He’ll provide you with a bold new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency.

This is the American Revolution as you’ve never seen it before: complex, global, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Simón Bolívar, who led the fight for independence from Spain throughout South America, as painted by José Hilarión Ibarra in about 1826.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Nightmares Before Christmas,” a discussion of Krampus and other dark holiday lore, with William Egginton, professor of humanities and director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-xmas-nightmares ]

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and if not a creature was stirring, it might have been because they were cowering under their bed covers, terrified. Come to Baltimore’s Guilford Hall Brewery for a discussion of frightening Christmas lore—the tales that inspire us to search our own souls and worry about the price that we’ll pay for being naughty rather than nice.

The star of the talk will be Krampus, the hairy, horned, demon who accompanies Saint Nicholas in visiting homes in Germany, Austria, and other Central European nations on the eve of the Feast of Saint Nicholas.

Americans happily embraced the kindly Saint Nicholas, who brings toys and chocolates to deserving children, as our own jolly, red-suited Santa Claus. We were less willing, however, to open our homes to the evil Krampus, who lurks behind St. Nick’s white beard and robes and promises punishments to those less deserving of treats. He’s catching on here now, however, as evident by the nation’s growing number of annual Krampus parades.

Professor Egginton, a scholar of horror in literature and popular culture, will summon up other frightening figures and dark lore associated with the holiday season. He’ll delve into the pagan roots of Christmas as a solstice ritual and show how its early origins helped give the season a sinister side and inspire traditions such as coal in stockings. He’ll talk about that mean one, Mister Grinch, conjure up the ghosts of Dickens, and explore the growing genre of Christmas horror films. And he’ll also show how thrilling and scary antics often associated with carnival and Halloween have their place in Christmas traditions.

Regardless of whether you’ve been naughty or nice, you’ll have a blast. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A visit from Krampus as depicted on an antique postcard.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Life of Frankenstein,” on the birth, evolution and impact of a tale of man-made monstrosity, with Bernard Welt, an emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University who frequently lectures on Frankenstein in literature, cinema, and culture.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-frankenstein ]

Guillermo del Toro’s lush and lovingly produced film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is just the latest of many iterations of the story to capture the public’s imagination. People have watched Victor Frankenstein give life to his monster in numerous films, on television, and on stage, and even perform “Putting on the Ritz” with him thanks to the comic genius of Mel Brooks.

Mary Shelley did not just tell a tale. She spawned the modern genre of speculative fiction and gave rise to a myth that would crop up in debates over nature versus nurture and other matters. Even today it stokes anxieties over the potential impacts of robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, by evoking the image of a monster turning on its progenitor.

Come gain a new appreciation of Mary Shelley’s creation with the help of Dr. Bernard Welt, who has studied the relationship between nightmares and the horror genre and is the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art.

Dr. Welt will start by telling a literary origin story almost as famous as Frankenstein itself, of how an 18-year-old, then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, started writing Frankenstein in 1816 while staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with two of her era’s leading poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her lover. Housebound by foul weather, the three read Gothic tales of ghosts and monsters and challenged each other to produce something even more terrifying. Mary dreamed up a story of a man who defied death by creating a living being out of scraps of deceased men harvested from graveyards and anatomy labs.

The resulting novel, Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818, would by that century’s end become a touchstone in philosophical discourse on the nature of humanity and in political discussions of imperialism and populism. By the 21st century, Mary Shelley (as she became) had earned a more significant place in the literary canon than either her husband or Lord Byron.

We will examine how this grisly tale became a landmark of modern thought and look at the part played by numerous film adaptations from the first years of cinema to the present day. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From a Theodor von Holst engraving in an 1831 edition of Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley of London.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Portraits of Art Heists,” a look at thefts from art museums and the struggle to prevent them, with Gary Vikan, former director and chief curator of the Walters Art Museum, former adjunct professor of art history at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Sacred and Stolen: Confessions of a Museum Director.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-art-heists .]

The security vulnerabilities of the Louvre were on full display in October, when a small group of petty thieves stole half of the royal jewels in its Appollo Gallery in broad daylight and in just seven minutes.
The reality is that such thefts are surprisingly common at museums in Paris, Baltimore, and beyond, and that museums have yet to find a full effective way to stop them.

Get a firsthand perspective on the problem of art theft from museums with Gary Vikan, an art historian who spent nearly 20 years as director of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum and gave a frank account of what goes on behind the scenes at such institutions in his 2016 book Sacred and Stolen.

He’ll discuss how most art thefts are inside jobs. Among the examples he’ll describe is the 1909 snatching of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” by an Italian museum handyman who hid in a closet overnight and walked out with the painting under his smock the next morning. You’ll also learn about the infamous (and still unsolved) Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum heist of 1990, in which a young night security officer let in a pair of fake police officers who then made off with a dozen treasures, including a rare Rembrandt seascape and a priceless Vermeer.

Dr. Vikan also will tell the improbable tales of two thefts from the Walters Art Museum. One was extraordinary for the enormous number of artworks stolen, 143. In the other, the Walters was among three museums hit after hours in a theft that included an exquisite little Renoir from the Baltimore Museum of Art. The case was unusual for the length of time it took—six decades--for it to be solved and for the last of the stolen works to be recovered. In both Baltimore cases the thieves were trusted museum employees.

Finally you’ll get updates on the investigation of the Louvre royal jewel theft, including the type of damning evidence the perpetrators left behind and what is known about whether the thieves were working for a crime boss or had help from the inside.

Dr. Vikan will go over the advice he would give a new museum director. It includes: Trust no one, including security staff and the police. Make it all but impossible to get in or out of the museum during non-public hours. Don’t let anyone into open storage alone. Know that if there is a heist everyone is a suspect, staff morale will crumble, and you may be asked to resign. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30).

Image: From Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III,” stolen repeatedly in the past (Dulwich Picture Gallery / Wikimedia).