Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Venezuela’s Future—and Ours,” an analysis of how the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela will affect that nation, the U.S., and the rest of the world, with Ernesto Castañeda, Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-venezuela-future .]

On January 3rd, after a long military buildup, the United States used special forces to seize Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela to stand trial here on criminal charges.

The development marked a major turning point in our relationship with Venezuela and the rest of Latin America and raised a host of complex questions, not just for Venezuelans living inside and outside that country but for American citizens and other nations of the world.
Coming to the stage to break down what all of this means is Ernesto Castañeda, a scholar of Latin America who has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks on immigration policy and has given dozens of interviews to media outlets around the world in the wake of the U.S. raid.

In a talk offering informed perspective on the latest news developments, Professor Castañeda will discuss various theories about why the U.S. conducted the operation to get Maduro out of Venezuela. He’s put our nation’s current plans for Venezuela into context by touching on previous U.S. military interventions in Latin America and beyond.

Professor Castañeda will look at the implications of recent events for U.S. politics and U.S. citizens and what such developments tell us about the balance of power in the United States. He’ll examine the distance between decisions made by the White House and public priorities, touching on how it all relates to our immigration policies and our views about peaceful protest and democracy.

He’ll consider how the Venezuela raid and our actions since have altered relations between the U.S. and other nations and provide scenarios about what the future might hold. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Pagan Roots of Late Winter Holidays,” a look at how ancient fertility rituals, Roman myths, and early challenges to Christianity gave us Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras, with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, scholar of medieval literature, author of several books on the Middle Ages, and visiting assistant teaching professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-late-winter-holidays .]

On the surface, at least, the holidays we celebrate near the transition of winter into spring have confounding contradictions. The beheading of the pious Saint Valentine is commemorated with lovemaking. Fat Tuesday’s debauchery arose as a way for Catholics to brace for the abstinence of Lent.

It all makes more sense, however, when we look back to seasonal celebrations in ancient Rome and Ireland, and account for Christianity’s knack for absorbing and incorporating earlier traditions and mixing them with a host of religious sentiments.

Coming to DC’s Penn Social to help us make sense of it all is medievalist Kat Tracy. Having written extensively on the synthesis of Christian and non-Christian traditions in medieval literature and culture, she’ll be serving up an assortment of lessons about the strange and dramatic origins of this February’s holidays (sparing George Washington and the presidents, of course.) It’s a talk that will forever change how you think about the season’s celebrations.

Dr. Tracy will talk about how the celebration of love associated with Valentine has its roots in the pre-Christian Roman celebration of Lupercalia—the February 15th Festival of the Wolf—when certain young men ran naked through parts of the city and tapped women with goat-skin whips dipped in blood out of a belief it would make them fertile. Also in the mix is the ancient Irish festival of Imbolc, the February 1st halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox, marking the beginning of spring and the season of rebirth. Christians there transformed it into the feast of Saint Brigid, whose story has been found to share common traits with a pagan Irish goddess of the same name.
From there, Dr. Tracy will discuss how Mardi Gras and Carnivale are Christian extensions of earlier Yuletide rites that stretched well into February, filling the time between winter and spring.

Her talk will leave you with a much richer understanding of how much the medieval world shaped our current lives. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Torch bearers at an Imbolc Festival in Marsden, England. (Photo by mrMark / Creative Commons.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Single Lesson,” a debunking of myths and misconceptions about singlehood and a look at research and advocacy efforts focused on the unmarried, with Craig Wynne, a professor of English at the University of the District of Columbia and pioneer in the growing field of Singles Studies.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-the-single-lesson .]

All around us are messages that being “coupled up” is the norm. Shows like The Bachelor, 90-Day Fiancé, and Indian Matchmaking have people rooting and fawning for marriage.

Yet, despite its supposed unpopularity, the rate of singlehood is increasing. By 2030, the Pew Research Center has projected, 25 percent of 45- to 54-year-old adults in the United States will never have married.

What’s the real picture when it comes to singles? Is a growing share of the population missing out on marital bliss, or are single people on to something?

Hear such questions tackled by Professor Craig Wynne, co-editor of Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies and author of How to be a Happy Bachelor.

Dr. Wynne will discuss how stereotypes of singlehood are perpetuated in the media and how they influence laws, policies, and our daily social interactions in ways that harm not just single people but those who are married, cohabitating, or in a relationship.

His talk will explore the concepts of “singlism,” the stereotyping and stigma around people who are not married or otherwise unpartnered; “matrimania,” over-the-top societal obsession with marriage and weddings; and “amatonormativity,” the assumption that a romantic relationship must be prioritized above all other kinds.

Finally, Dr. Wynne will discuss the emergence of Singles Studies—a field devoted to granting singlehood validity in an academic context—and look at recent advocacy intended to secure single people equity in a world that still privileges being married or coupled. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Love and Monsters,” on the inescapable bond between romance and horror, with Joshua Barton, scholar of horror and lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-love-monsters .]

Romance and horror might seem like opposite genres, but they share a deep emotional core, and the combination of them has captivated audiences across time and culture.

Put even your worst Valentine’s Day in perspective by hearing this strange relationship discussed by Joshua Barton, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans with his past talks on cryptids, American horror, and Christmas ghosts.

He’ll explore the undeniable and unsettling intersection of romance and horror and examine how and why love and fear intensify each other and combined to create tension, drive narratives, and explore human vulnerability.

We’ll look at works that have blended passion and terror, including Gothic literature like the vampire novella Carmilla and modern films like Spring and Crimson Peak. We’ll study the fine line between obsession and adoration running through Stephen King’s “I Know What You Need,” Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, and the timeless The Phantom of the Opera. We’ll discuss the seeds of monstrous love that were planted with Beauty and the Beast and Creature from the Black Lagoon and bloom ferociously in works like Twilight and The Shape of Water. Through it all, we’ll find the threads of otherness and the taboo that intertwine horror, love, and reflections on identity.

Join us for a journey through storytelling that combines the grotesque and the scintillating as we uncover why romance and horror are a match made in the dark. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From the original 1954 advertising poster for Creature from the Black Lagoon (Artist: Reynold Brown / Public Domain).