Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Haunted Landscapes of Middle-Earth,” on J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of horror, with Peter Grybauskas, who has written extensively on Tolkien and teaches courses on him at the University of Maryland and abroad in the UK.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/hauntedhobbits/ .]

Come on a tour of some of the spookiest sites in Tolkien’s invented world to learn where, how, and why the beloved author injected hearty doses of horror into his high fantasy. You’ll learn how Tolkien tapped into medieval sources, dreams, and his own war experiences to make Middle-earth frightfully real.

Your guide on this journey, Peter Grybauskas, is the editor of a new volume of Tolkien’s scholarship and poetry, The Battle of Maldon (together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth) and author of A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas. He wowed Profs and Pints fans when he gave this talk in Washington D.C. last year.

We’ll venture into the abandoned Mines of Moria, look out at the Dead Marshes, and explore other terrifying realms. From there, we’ll go on a haunted-hayride detour through Tolkien’s Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, a one-act play in which a young poet and an old farmer take a wagon out after dark to pick their way through a freshly-fought battlefield to find the headless body of their English lord.

Come for the jump scares, ghoulish sights and grisly discoveries. Stay for the profound exploration of the cost of war, the codes of chivalry, and the sources of poetic inspiration, all conveyed through some of Tolkien’s finest alliterative dialogue. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Tolkien drew from his memories of World War I battlefields like this one in creating the corpse-filled “Dead Marshes” of The Lord of the Rings. (Subsequently tinted November 1917 photo of Passchendaele by William Rider Rider/ Library and Archives Canada.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Macabre Poe,” a look at Edgar Allan Poe’s most gruesome and horrifying works and what inspired them, with Amy Branam Armiento, professor of English at Frostburg State University, immediate past president of the Poe Studies Association, and editor of two books on the acclaimed American author.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/usherhouse/ .]

Stephen King has said that he and other horror writers are all “the children of Poe,” a reference to how they’re unable to escape his shadow. Although Edgar Allan Poe penned works in a long list of genres, including fantasy, detective fiction, and poetry, his most prominent legacy is as the master of the macabre. Over the nearly two centuries since Poe lived, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Masque of the Red Death” have haunted millions of readers.

Who, exactly, was Poe? Why does he remain as one of the United States’ best-known writers at home and abroad? Why do his works continue to resonate with readers more than 150 years after they were published?

Come hear such questions tackled by Amy Branam Armiento, a leading Poe scholar who edited More Than Love: The Enduring Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe, co-edited Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision, and formerly served as president of an international organization that supports the scholarly and informal exchange of information on Poe’s life, works, times, and influence.

Professor Armiento will look at which people and events influenced Poe’s literary works. His troubled life included the slow deaths of his mother, brother, foster mother, and wife, as well as a problematic relationship with alcohol and a difficult relationship with his foster father. All shaped his relationship with death, horror, and the unknown.
She'll also look at how Poe’s horror tales laid the groundwork for the characters, circumstances, and other conventions of horror stories.

We’ll explore how Poe shattered literary conventions of his own time by embracing lurid descriptions of violence, especially violence perpetrated between family members and loved ones. You’ll learn how Poe adapted conventions of the fairy tale to create his memorable, haunting tales, an aspect of his work that is hidden in plain sight.

The presentation will also include examples of evocative artwork used to illustrate editions of Poe's works. Get ready to feel chills down your spine. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Poe as depicted in a modern retouched version of a daguerreotype by Mathew Benjamin Brady. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Meet the Monster,” an exploration of monsters and monstrosity in legend, literature, and our own minds, with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, visiting faculty at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and former professor of medieval literature.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/underbed/ .]

Throughout history human minds have given rise to monsters as representations of our worst fears. In literature, monsters also have served a much broader purpose, as devices used in social or political commentary to cry out against corruption, inequality, and political and scientific despotism.

Spend a thoughtful evening getting to know things that go bump in the night with Dr. Kat Tracy, a scholar of all things saucy and nasty and the vice president of an academic society devoted to the study of medieval monsters and cryptozoology.

Taking us on a journey through time, she’ll help us get to know some of the earliest human-form monsters in world literature and culture. We’ll will look at the monstrous figures in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Dante’s Inferno, and Old Norse sagas, as well as at werewolf narratives from France, vampire tales from around the world, and ancient Greek myths.

We’ll trace the evolution of monsters in literature through the advent of the Gothic horror novel, and we’ll look at what monsters have come to represent in cultural festivals such as Diá de los Meurtos and Halloween, which brings monsters to our front doors.

Dr. Tracy will tackle questions such as: What makes a monster? How do monsters reflect our fears and our desires? Why are we so drawn to some monsters, like vampires, that we even find them sexy? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A colored etching of a “Peruvian harpy” dating to the 1700s. (Public Domain / Wellcome Collection.)

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Medieval Monsters,” with Lilla Kopár, a professor of medieval literature and culture at Catholic University who teaches courses on medieval monster lore and Norse mythology.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/manticore/ .

Bar the door and clutch your sword. Profs and Pints is about to bring you a Halloween-season visit from the monsters that kept medieval people awake throughout long, dark nights.

Your guide in touring this menacing menagerie will be Dr. Lilla Kopár, an expert on early medieval England and Scandinavia who teaches Catholic University’s students about things that terrified in days of yore. Her illustrated talk will explore the origins of medieval monster lore in the classical, biblical, and Norse mythological traditions. It also will give us a much more nuanced understanding of monsters, explaining how we don’t just fear them, but love them and badly need them in our lives.

Among the questions Dr. Kopár will tackle: What, exactly, is a monster? Where do monsters come from? Why do all cultures need them?

She’ll discuss how monsters are highly functional constructs. They help us define who we are and who were aren’t, and to explain, structure, and control the world around us. They highlight differences and they mark cultural categories and boundaries—which they then trespass. We can project our fears onto them and then feel better when we confine and kill them. Without monsters there are no heroes.

We’ll encounter categorization-defying monsters that are a mixture of beasts or half beast and half human. We’ll spend time with famous literary monsters, including dragons, giants, and the monsters of Beowulf and the King Arthur legends. We’ll get to know monsters that found a place on old maps or the sides of cathedrals.

On the much darker side, we’ll learn how monstrosity was attributed to people who were somehow different—through disease, disability, or belief in another religion—often as a means of justifying their exclusion or persecution. Sometimes belief in monsters turned people into monsters themselves. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A gargoyle at England’s Magdalen College. (Photo by Chris Creagh / Wikimedia Commons.)