Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Horror as Queer,” a look at the influence and depiction of queerness in horror films, with May Santiago, adjunct professor of film studies at George Mason University and producer of the podcast Horrorspiria.

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

Horror was queer long before both Brad and Janet succumbed to the charms of Dr. Frank-N-Further in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In fact, one could make the argument that, for both better and worse, the history of horror films is the history of queers on film. Film scholar May Santiago will do just that, with plenty of vivid examples, in a talk that has earned rave reviews.

You’ll learn how queer authors, such as F.W. Murnau and James Whale, were there at the very beginning. Murnau played a central role in the German expressionist movement that gave rise to films such as Nosferatu, while Whale left a body of work full of queer codes, including the films Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man.

From there, Santiago will discuss how the representational codes established by such queer filmmakers were appropriated throughout the celluloid century by non-queer authors who constructed cinematic horror language that used queerness as shorthand for the monstrous. The result was harmful stereotypes of queer people in films and society, with examples being the stoic psycho lesbian trope embodied by Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, the transgender sex-obsessed serial murderer Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the villains of Dressed to Kill and Silence of the Lambs.

Yet, even with these negative portrayals of explicit or implicit queerness, horror cinema’s relationship with queerness and queer audiences has grown stronger with each passing decade, with queer authors and queer audiences reclaiming the monstrosity that created the basis of the horror genre. Santiago will look at how the evolution of horror films coincided with that of queer stereotypes and how queer authors embedded queerness in films that aren’t explicitly queer. Among the questions she’ll tackle: How did we come around to thinking that the Babadook was gay? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A frame from the 1920 silent German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (Tint added.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Great American Road Trip,” a look at how long journeys and tales of them have shaped our nation, with Allen Pietrobon, historian and professor of Global Affairs at Trinity Washington University.

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

American history and popular culture are infused with travel narratives, be they accounts of wagon-train journeys to settle the west, descriptions of life aboard steamboats plying our great rivers, or memoirs of modern cross-country road trips.

Why are tales of cross-country travel such an integral part of American culture? What can our nation’s long tradition of road tripping teach us about our country and ourselves?

Get ready for the summer travel season by hearing such questions tackled at DC’s Penn Social. The speaker, Allen Pietrobon, is a historian who has earned a following among Profs and Pints fans by delivering spellbinding talks on prohibition, the gilded age, the race to build the atomic bomb, and other important chapter of our past.

Professor Pietrobon will start by looking at the various ways Americans traveled in the past and what it was like to be aboard a wagon in the 1840s or a transcontinental railroad in the 1880s. He’ll talk about the rapid growth of interstates of the 1960s, the associated rise of fast food and roadside motels, and, most importantly, the birth of the notion that the open road is the epitome of American freedom.

From there, Dr. Pietrobon will look at some iconic travel stories written from the perspective of travelers who found themselves to be outsiders along the way, including Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, John Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie, and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. In most of these stories the protagonist is positioned as an explorer in a new and unfamiliar landscape, whether that be Jim Crow-era Alabama or the vast expanse of the American West. They set off to encounter the “real” America and end up on a journey of self-discovery as well.

Learning about such journeys, both real and imagined, will give you plenty to think about the next time you hit the road. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: U.S. Route 163 at Monument Valley in Utah. (Image by m01229 / Wikimedia Commons)

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Deer to Us,” on more than 12,000 years of interactions between eastern North America’s white-tailed deer and human residents, with Elic Weitzel, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor of anthropology at George Mason University.

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

Given their abundance in our backyards and along highway corridors, few people today would suspect that white-tailed deer were on the verge of extinction at the turn of the 20th century mainly as a result of commercial hunting.

Learn about the complicated, centuries-old relationship between deer and people in our region with Elic Weitzel, who has spent the last decade studying the historical ecology of white-tailed deer and other species.

He’ll tell the story of our white-tail deer from prehistoric abundance to steady decline from the colonial era deerskin trade to resurgence under the modern conservation movement.

Combining evidence from archaeological excavations, historical sources, and contemporary conservation biology, Dr. Weitzel will describe how Native Americans hunted and managed deer for millennia and discuss the reasons why this pre-colonial hunting may have been relatively sustainable.

He’ll talk about how deer populations began to decline after the arrival of Europeans on our continent, and he’ll discuss the role that the deerskin trade and market economics played. Finally, he’ll look at how conservation efforts in the 20th century led to the recovery of deer and to the (sometimes problematic) abundance we see today.

You’ll learn lessons from the past that can help us better understand and promote sustainability in the present and future. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A white-tailed deer. (Photo by Roy Smith / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The History of Plastic Surgery,” with Dr. Wendy Chen, plastic, reconstructive, and hand surgeon and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

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

Most people misunderstand plastic surgery as vain and aesthetic, but the origins of this fascinating specialty are much deeper than that.
Come gain a rich understanding of the roots, medical impact, and current wide reach of a life-altering medical specialty with Dr. Wendy Chen, a leading educator on plastic and reconstructive surgery who has won awards for her work in clinical, basic science and education research.

She’ll talk about how reconstructive surgery has been around for thousands of years, with evidence of it having been practiced in ancient Egypt and India, and has made advancements in the course of major wars. Those who practice it have been innovators in medicine, playing a major role in breakthroughs and winning the Nobel prize for kidney transplantation.

The need for plastic and reconstructive surgery has stemmed largely from how much our appearance influences how we navigate our worlds and how others regard us. There was a time, in fact, when people in American prisons were offered plastic surgery as an intervention against recidivism. Yet reconstructive surgery also has faced opposition, such as religious bans on its practice stemming from the belief that physical differences are a manifestation of spiritual sin.

Fast forward to now when plastic surgeons treat patients of every age for every kind of ailment, from congenital differences to trauma to cancer. Yes, some plastic and reconstructive surgery is to help people conform to tabloid- and social media-driven narratives of what defines beauty, but the field involves a lot more than injecting Botox and shaping buttocks. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Reconstructive facial surgery as illustrated by Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery in the late 1840s (Wellcome Collection / public domain).