Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Happiness Workshop,” a look at what recent research and centuries of wisdom tell us about bringing more joy and contentment to our lives, with Eric Zillmer, professor of psychology and the director of the Happiness Lab at Drexel University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-happiness-workshop .]

Are you happy? If not, how do you get there?

Gain insights into happiness with Eric Zillmer, an award-winning teacher who leads a creative think tank that investigates the ingredients for happiness among individual people and communities.

You’ll learn how the study of happiness is a growing, evidence-based field known as positive psychology, which aims to find solutions to happiness challenges that can bring positive change to our lives and environments.

Dr. Zillmer will discuss the meaning of happiness and its place in our lives and society. He’ll draw from recent science and great thinkers in discussing how we can increase our own happiness and well-being, throwing out a few practical tips as well.

He’ll talk about whether happiness can be measured and where in our brain happiness is located. We’ll look at the influence of socializing and social media on our happiness and about the roles that music, humor, adversity, and regret have in happiness research.

Dr. Zillmer will discuss what we learn about happiness from competitive sports, and he’ll suggest ten actions that you can engage in that will make you happier.

Among the questions he’ll tackle: What is the happiest day of the week? Can a specific place make you happy? What can we learn about happiness from travelling the world? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Happiness in the face of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. (Photo by Wonderlane / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Torture in the Middle Ages,” with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, visiting assistant teaching professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and author or editor of ten books on medieval violence.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-torture-middle-ages .]

When Pulp Fiction’s Marsellus Wallace vows to “get medieval” on someone we assume that they’re in for some serious pain. Torture—that most notorious aspect of medieval culture and society—more recently has been portrayed in popular culture in series like Game of Thrones and Vikings, through lurid scenes depicting torture and gruesome punishment as standard medieval practice. In many modern European cities one can find popular museums displaying such gruesome implements as the rack, the strappado, the gridiron, the wheel, and the iron maiden.

The dominant mythology suggests that the Middle Ages was a period during which sadistic torment was inflicted on citizens with impunity and without provocation. The truth, however, is a lot more complicated.
Join Professor Larissa “Kat” Tracy, who has extensively researched torture, punishment, and social justice in medieval society, for a talk challenging preconceived ideas that popular historians, films, and media have promoted about the prevalence of torture and judicial brutality in medieval society.

She’ll discuss medieval Europe’s actual use of torture—the instruments, the laws, the cultural norms, and the victims—and make clear that the act of punishment was actually a very different legal event. She’ll argue that the portrayals of medieval torture in literature represent satire, critique and dissent; they have didactic and political functions in opposing the status quo.

The books that Professor Tracy has written or edited include Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature; Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages; Medieval and Early Modern Murder; Flaying in the Premodern World, and most recently End Game: Exile and Execution in Medieval and Early Modern Society. When she gets medieval on you it means you are going to learn. The experience, however, won’t be painful at all. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Torture instruments on display at Prague Castle. Photo by Clayton Tang / Wikimedia Commons.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Terrors of Irish Fairylore,” an introduction to Ireland’s strange and unsettling folkloric “Good People,” with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University, co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, and co-author of the new book Fairylore: A Compendium of the Fae Folk.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-terrors-of-irish-fairlylore2 .]

Today it is common to think of fairies as small, childlike, sparkly creatures with glittering wings and dresses made from flower petals. But the fae of traditional Irish folklore were no such things.

Amoral, capricious, even malicious when they chose to be, the too-frequently forgotten fairies of times long past would, more often than not, haunt nightmares.

Join Brittany Warman, a folklorist who has earned a devoted following among Profs and Pints fans, as she explores the darker side of Irish fairylore.

The figures she'll discuss include: The Leanan-Sidhe, a vampiric fairy who gives artistic inspiration in exchange for your mortal spirit. The Dullahan, a fairy with a human spine for a whip and a habit of hurtling across fields in a death coach made from human skin. The Banshee, a mournful fairy whose cry signals a death in the family to which she's attached herself.

Dr. Warman also will examine the surprising impact of fairy folklore on two classics of Irish Gothic literature, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

It’s a talk that will remind you that the relationship between the Irish and the spooky stretches well beyond Halloween. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: “The Banshee Appears,” an 1862 illustration by Robert Prowse (Wicklow Heritage / Public domain).

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Nightmares and Creativity,” on the relationship between frightening dreams and real creative achievements, with Bernard Welt, emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University, former member of the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and contributing editor of DreamTime.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-nightmares-and-creativity.]

Nightmares are associated with creativity—but how, exactly? Why do so many famous accounts of genius in the arts and sciences originate with a frightening dream?

Explore such questions with the help of Bernard Welt, who has taught courses on recalling dreams and dream journaling and written extensively on the relationship between dreaming and the arts.

Using excerpts from texts, illustrations of artworks, and clips from classic films derived from nightmares, Professor Welt will look at the relationship between bad dreams and celebrated innovations and creative accomplishments.

You’ll learn why psychologists consider the nightmare to be a key to understanding the creative power of the unconscious mind. We’ll consider sleep scientists’ definitions of the nightmare, asking why it still remains controversial, and explore contemporary theories about the relationship between nightmares and creativity from psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypal theory, evolutionary psychology, and other sources.

Though dreams have special authority in many cultures, in the western world it’s only among the nineteenth-century Romantics that we began to see personal accounts of creativity inspired by dreams—curiously, preponderantly bad ones. We’ll look at how Frankenstein arose from Mary Shelley’s famous dream of a scientist confronted by his own fearful creation, and how art’s Surrealist movement taught us to value our nightmares.

You’ll learn how dreams of all kinds can result in sudden inspiration because they relax inhibitions, transcend habitual trains of thought, and permit ideas that would be rejected by the thought processes of waking life. You’ll even come to see why we may welcome our nightmares as opportunities to expand our vision and our understanding. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (public domain).