Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Mental Health in an Unhinged World,” a guide to managing stress in turbulent times that evoke big existential questions, with Jillian Tucker, licensed clinical social worker in private practice and an adjunct professor of clinical social work at Columbia University and New York University.

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

It’s tough to stay grounded when the world seems upside-down.

So much of what’s going on around us can feel overwhelming, especially at a time when globalization and the omnipresence of social media increase our exposure to conflict and to troubling international and national news. Adding to the stress: Many of these crises bring up core questions about morality, mortality, the unknown, and life’s meaning.

There’s good news, however: People have figured out how to get through turbulent times before, and the fields of psychology and neuroscience have affirmed the wisdom of many of their coping strategies while helping equip us with new ones.

Learn how to better cope with chaos with Jillian Tucker, an award-winning clinical practice instructor who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks.

She’ll provide valuable context by discussing how humans have always dealt with existential stressors—in fact, many of the earliest human objects, traditions and stories reflect effort to make sense of life. You’ll learn how people have coped with turbulent times throughout history by drawing from cultural and ancestral experience and wisdom as well as other sources of resilience. We’ll examine a full range of coping skills from history, philosophy, spirituality, art, literature, music, and dance.

Dr. Tucker also will discuss coping skills rooted in modern psychology and neuroscience. She’ll talk about neuroscientific research finding that spirituality, in a broad sense, can help protect us from distress. You’ll learn about biological, psychological, social, environmental, and movement-based strategies for managing short- and long-term stressors. You’ll also get tips on how to assess your current individual and group coping skills and make sure you have the right skills when you need them. You’ll gain a newfound appreciation of the value of seeking joy, connection, and mirth as an antidote to the stress in our lives.

You’ll gain insight into how the global situation can distress us on an individual level. We’ll look at the role that our digital lives play in exacerbating stressors and how to curate digital overuse while still using technology to maintain social connections and bring meaningful change. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk itself starts at 6:30)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Baltimore 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.

[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/victorians-sexual-underground .]

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 Baltimore’s Guilford 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, and 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.)

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 Baltimore presents: “Cartoonists Under Siege,” on the rich history and uncertain future of political cartooning, with Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, award-winning editorial cartoonist for The Economist, former artist in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and frequent speaker at universities.

[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-cartoonists .]

It’s a tumultuous time to be a political cartoonist, with those who hold such a job title struggling to weather the failure of newspapers as well as pressure and threats stemming from the overall degradation of public discourse. Yet, meanwhile, the appetite for satire is exploding.

How did we get to this point? What does the future hold for the artists whose irreverent takes on the issues of the day have long stirred and informed political debate?

Hear such questions tackled by Kevin Kallaugher, an international award-winning political cartoonist widely known by the pen name KAL, who previously worked for The Baltimore Sun, continues to maintain a repository of his work at Kaltoons.com, and routinely speaks at prestigious higher-education institutions such as Harvard and Columbia.

In a copiously illustrated lecture he’ll take you through the history of the cartoon craft, showing how irreverent illustrations in 18th century England and France paved the way for the caustic caricatures of today. He’ll introduce you to influential caricaturists like Paris’s Honore Daumier and New York’s Al Hirschfeld and offer insights into the social skills required to excel in this ancient art.

Kallaugher will walk his audience through the unique set of challenges currently facing him and his colleagues. They include a new media landscape in which upstart media platforms have siphoned audiences away from the legacy media, the traditional home for cartoonists. On top of that, an increasingly threatening political environment has put satirists in crosshairs and political cartoonists face competition from Artificial Intelligence programs that feed, without pay or credit, off artists’ work.

We’ll look at how cartoonists are adapting and at the future prospects for visual satire. The lecture will close out with a live demonstration of how Kallaugher draws prominent public personalities. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: “Freedom of the Press,” an 1834 comic drawn by Honoré Daumier (Cleveland Museum of Art / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Reverse Underground Railroad,” with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.

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

What if the Underground Railroad had an evil counterpart that ran in the opposite direction and transported people from freedom to captivity? What if there was a black-market network of human traffickers and slave traders who made their livings by stealing away thousands of free African Americans from the northern states in order to sell them into slavery in the Deep South?

Believe it or not such a thing existed.

The most famous unwilling rider on this Reverse Underground Railroad was Solomon Northup, the author of Twelve Years a Slave and the subject of the Oscar-winning 2013 movie. But Northup was far from the only prisoner-passenger.

Over the first six decades of the nineteenth century, kidnappers stole thousands upon thousands of free black people, the vast majority of them children, from the streets of cities like Philadelphia. The victims were trafficked overland across the country, a journey of two million steps, and sold into slavery in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Join historian Richard Bell, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans, for a gripping, eye-opening talk in which he’ll reconstruct the Reverse Underground Railroad in all its horror.

Dr. Bell will lay out the Reverse Underground Railroad’s origins and motives, as well as its scale and its spread. He’ll recover the lives of both the captors and captives. He’ll describe the routes the kidnappers took and the techniques they used to lure away free African Americans, and he’ll explain the dramatic impact these abductions had upon the growing antislavery fight. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk itself starts at 6:30)

Image: The 1837 kidnapping of Peter John Lee, a free African American man from Westchester County, N.Y., by four men from New York City (The Anti-Slavery Almanac / Public domain).