Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Folkloric Felines,” a look at cats in folklore and fairy tales, with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

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

As any cat owner (servant) will tell you, cats are special in ways that make them more than mere domesticated pets. Moreover, humans’ fascination with felines is nothing new, dating back to well before the worship of cats in ancient Egypt.

Join Brittany Warman, a folklorist who has earned a devoted following among Profs and Pints fans, as she explores how our spoiled housecats have inspired the human imagination.

She’ll discuss how cats have been associated with a huge variety of folk beliefs, folk magics, and folktales. They were feared as an agent of the Devil in early Europe and celebrated and reviled throughout the Western world as a witch’s familiar, a creature of magic and mischief. You’ll learn about the enormous Cat Sith of Celtic folklore, the Norwegian Forest Cats of the goddess Freya, and the monstrous Yule Cat of Iceland.

Of course, cats prowl through our fairy tales, too. We will quest with “Puss in Boots,” converse with “The White Cat,” observe the ascension of royalty in “The King of Cats,” and more. Sometimes fairy-tale cats are kind helpers, sometimes they are dastardly tricksters, and they are both in the exact same tale. With a cat, you can never be sure what you’re going to get!

This talk promises to be more fun than chasing the beam of a laser pointer. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The Norse goddess Freya’s cat chariot depicted in Ypres, Belgium’s 2012 cat parade. (Photo by Zeisterre / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints DC 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.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-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. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

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

Profs and Pints DC 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/dc-unhinged-world .]

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. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia 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://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nv-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. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

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