Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Power of Cults,” on how cults operate, recruit members, and get people to stay, with Mariah Wilkerson, adjunct professor of psychology at George Mason 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://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-power-of-cults ]

Most people believe that they’d never join a cult, yet cults have existed for thousands of years and continue to pop up all over the world.
What makes people join cults and why is it so hard to leave them? Hear these and other questions about cults tackled by Mariah Wilkerson, a social psychologist with a deep interest in them.

Dr. Wilkerson will take you inside the psychology of cults, both demystifying them and busting common myths about them.

She’ll describe how cults grab people's attention by co-opting religious doctrine or messaging around current social issues. Once people are drawn in, cults use simple, yet powerful, social psychological techniques to keep them from leaving, to take money or other resources away from them, and to even pressure them to commit horrendous crimes.

We’ll look at how cults recruit through positive reinforcement, love bombing, and charismatic leadership, and then control through cognitive dissonance and through deindividuation—the shedding of self-awareness and personal identity.

You’ll learn how cults cause people to undergo dramatic psychological changes that alter how they make sense of the world and interact with others. Dr. Wilkerson will shed light on why leaving a cult can be so difficult as well as what happens to someone psychologically once that person is out. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Members of the Rajneesh movement at a 1981 festival. (Photo by Marcel Antonisse / Dutch National Archives / Creative Commons.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “When Dickens Came to Baltimore,” on the great English writer’s tumultuous relationship with our nation, with Brian Murray, professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland and author of The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens.

[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://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-dickens ]

‘Tis the season for readings and performances of A Christmas Carol, but its author, Charles Dickens, produced a host of other classic works and lived a life that itself represents a great story. Twice he travelled to Baltimore and other American cities, and in his relationship with our nation he experienced a change of heart akin to the transformations of old Scrooge himself.

Come to Baltimore’s Guilford Hall to learn about Dickens’ travels to—and thoughts about—the United States with Brian Murray, a scholar of Dickens and the author of two books on him.

You’ll learn how Charles Dickens first visited America in 1842, when he was only 30 but already a literary celebrity known for novels like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby. One American admirer had assured Dickens that the trip would be “a triumph,” but six months later Dickens couldn’t wait to leave, and many Americans were happy to see him go.

What happened? While Dickens had encountered here much to his liking, he’d found Americans to be not only rude and unhygienic, but also dishonest—a response to publishers here shamelessly pirating his work. Many Americans, in turn, were put off by the dandified Dickens looking more like a “low-bred” stage actor than the dignified man of letters they imagined, with one American editorialist describing him as “no gentleman” and “a mere mercenary scoundrel.” Dickens left this country largely disillusioned, and the book in which recorded his observations, American Notes for General Circulation, created a scandal here.

When Dickens returned to the States in 1868, however, things changed for the now-ailing writer, who since his last trip had become famous for works such as A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield. He was cheered everywhere, and the 20,000 pounds he earned over the course of his travels here became a large part of his final estate. He returned the love, congratulating Americans for noticeable improvements in their civic and cultural life.

Being on hand for this talk will give you a much richer understanding of Dickens and our own nation, whose values and mores he observed as it was still forging an identity distinct from its British roots. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Dickens as photographed by the Watkins Studio in 1861 (British Library / Creative Commons).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Green Knight and Medieval Yule,” a look at the Arthurian holiday legend and pre-Christian belief in “green men,” with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, professor of medieval literature and author of several books on the Middle Ages.

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

The fourteenth-century Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight captures the festive spirit of the Christmas season in a distinctly dramatic way, with the arrival at the court of King Arthur of a striking green visitor with holly branch in one hand and an ax in the other. Told in verse form, it’s a story full of references to holiday festivities, hunts, and romantic intrigue, and it’s rooted both in Christianity and pre-Christian ideas of green men with plant features.

Bring some added magic to your holiday season by coming to Baltimore's Guilford Hall for a talk that will immerse you in the strange tale of the Green Knight and the beliefs and symbols it draws upon.

Dr. Larissa Tracy, a medievalist who has extensively researched Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, will discuss how the poem set at Yuletide traces the pre-Christian calendar as Gawain waits a year and a day to face his Otherworldly opponent at the mysterious Green Chapel.

To provide broader cultural context, she’ll discuss how the image of the Green Knight has its roots in the Green Man, a pre-Christian figure that co-existed with Christianity—as seen in the dozens of examples carved into the stonework of Rosslyn Chapel, outside of Edinburgh, Scotland. Scholars have wondered at the seemingly contradictory presence of these images in a Christian site, but the Green Man is not at odds with medieval Christianity. It often figures as a facet of it—an embodiment of similar religious sentiments that intertwined over the centuries.

Whether you are a fan of Arthurian legends, enjoyed The Green Knight film released in 2020, or simply have an interest in how pagan nature beliefs live on in our culture, you’ll be glad you planted yourself down in the audience for this talk. Christmas trees and wreaths will wish they could be there. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A Green Man in the woodwork of England’s Lincoln Cathedral. Photo by Richard Croft / Creative Commons. (Green tint added.)