Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

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.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-life-of-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 Shelley 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 Byron and her husband Shelley.

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. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

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: “The Haunted House,” on scary dwellings and their grip on us, with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[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-the-haunted-house ]

The haunted house has long held a place in the imaginations of those who enjoy a bit of uncanny terror, posing the ultimate threat to security and normalcy. It’s where something familiar becomes strange and unsettling, even threatening. You initially might have thought you're safe—after all, you should be safe indoors—but you're not. Sanctuary and shelter have turned against you. The very walls trouble your dreams.

Come tour some of the most terrifying real estate ever imagined with Brittany Warman, who has earned herself a large and devoted following among Profs and Pints audiences with excellent past talks on folklore, fairy tales, and horror.

She’ll show you the fascinating folkloric, literary, and real-world history of the haunted house. She’ll leave you wondering about the creepy old places in your town with doors that you’re afraid to approach on Halloween, and she might even leave you eager to turn your own home into such an eerie dwelling.

She’ll begin by discussing the scary structures of fairy tales, such as gingerbread houses and Bluebeard's castle, exploring how the early stories told about them influenced the terrifying tales of Henry James' Bly Manor and Edgar Allen Poe's House of Usher. She’ll consider the impact of haunted spaces on the Gothic and horror genres and explain why haunted houses are often so opulent and so decadent in their decay.

Among the questions Dr. Warman will tackle: What might the haunted house have to say about history, culture, and society? What draws us, again and again, to haunted houses, making us want to visit them, find their ghosts, and uncover their stories?

She'll conclude by examining how these tales still resonate today, in haunted houses both purportedly real and those decidedly fake, meant for shocks and thrills. Even Disney's Haunted Mansion ride will make an appearance. It’s a scary world after all. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: An abandoned house near Pocomoke City, Md., in 2008. (Photo by Matt Trostle / Creative Commons.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “How Ancient Athens Restored Democracy,” on lessons to be learned from an overthrow of tyrants in 403 B.C., with Nicholas D. Cross, assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Roots of Cooperation: Constructing Interstate Alliances in Ancient Greece.

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

The defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War led to its democracy being replaced by the Thirty Tyrants, an oligarchic regime that consolidated power through executions and political repression. Democratic exiles managed to organize resistance, defeat the oligarchic forces, and return to Athens to restore democratic government, but then faced the far more challenging task of reconciling a community torn apart by political divisions.

The restorers of Athenian democracy grappled with a question that often arises in periods of political upheaval: Can a deeply divided community ever overcome its past and build a shared future? Learn how they managed to bring about such an outcome in a talk that holds hopeful lessons for our own time.

The speaker, Dr. Nicholas Cross, teaches the history of ancient Greece and Rome and is the author of a forthcoming biography of the leader of democratic resistance to the Thirty Tyrants, Thrasybulus of Steiria: An Athenian Hero?

He’ll describe how the settlement that followed the civil war included an amnesty designed to prevent cycles of retaliation, but Athens nonetheless remained deeply divided. Among those who had to find a way to live together once more were former democrats, supporters of oligarchy, and citizens such as Socrates whose conduct during the regime was open to question.

Democracy’s return was not a straightforward triumph. It instead involved dealing with tensions and making political decisions intended to enable peaceful coexistence possible. The Athenians had to balance both accountability with reconciliation and the desire for revenge with the need for lasting political stability.

The events of 403 BC remind us that rebuilding a divided society requires not only restoring political institutions but also reviving trust and learning to coexist with former adversaries. The lessons they learned in the process remain relevant nearly 2500 years later. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: The Acropolis at Athens as painted by Leo von Klenze in 1846 (Neue Pinakothek museum / Wikimedia Commons).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “How to Feel Worthy,” with Marisa G. Franco, psychologist, assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland’s Honors College, and New York Times best-selling author of Platonic and the new book Worth: The New Science of Self-esteem and Secure Attachment.

[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-feel-worthy]

If you don't feel worthy, you can achieve great success but still feel like a failure. You can find great love and still feel unlovable.
Sometimes the very things that should make us feel worthy only make us feel worse. Studies reveal that if we don't feel worthy, we are more likely to deflect compliments and affiliate with people who treat us negatively. Fascinatingly, when positive events happen in our lives, we only feel sicker.

But there is a way forward.

Join Dr. Marisa G. Franco, who previously has given outstanding Profs and Pints talks on friendship, for an interactive evening built to help you shift long-held negative beliefs about yourself.

She’ll describe how self-worth is stubborn, because our brain is invested in maintaining the same sense of self-worth that we developed in childhood. It does this to protect us, so that we don’t trick ourselves into feeling better and get further crushed should the harms of our past—rejection, bullying, neglect—happen again.

You'll learn about the paradox of self-worth and how the very things that should make you feel more worthy--people who love you, great success—can actually only make you feel worse. You worry that you can't live up to others' expectations and you experience more anxiety.

Dr. Franco will discuss the foundation of self-worth and how, as researchers put it, “memories are the database of self-esteem,” with low self-worth stemming from memories of being rejected, bullied, or otherwise harmed.

We’ll delve into research-backed ways to improve self-worth. Although we can't change the past, cutting-edge research on memory reconsolidation finds that we can change how the past lives within us. As researchers put it, memories are made to predict the future, not to record the past, which means the emotional impact of memories can be updated every time we revisit them. You’ll learn how to do so during this talk.

Being on hand will help both those who have struggled with their sense of self and those who think they have it figured out. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From “Triple Self Portrait” by Rick Beerhorst (Creative Commons).