What we’re about
Profs and Pints brings professors and other college instructors into bars, cafes, and other venues to give fascinating talks or to conduct instructive workshops. They cover a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, popular culture, horticulture, literature, creative writing, and personal finance. Anyone interested in learning and in meeting people with similar interests should join. Lectures are structured to allow at least a half hour for questions and an additional hour for audience members to meet each other. Admission to Profs and Pints events requires the purchase of tickets, either in advance (through the link provided in event descriptions) or at the door to the venue. Many events sell out in advance.
Although Profs and Pints has a social mission--expanding access to higher learning while offering college instructors a new income source--it is NOT a 501c3. It was established as a for-profit company in hopes that, by developing a profitable business model, it would be able to spread to other communities much more quickly than a nonprofit dependent on philanthropic support. That said, it is welcoming partners and collaborators as it seeks to build up audiences and spread to new cities. For more information email profsandpints@hotmail.com.
Thank you for your interest in Profs and Pints.
Regards,
Peter Schmidt, Founder, Profs and Pints
Upcoming events (4+)
See all- Profs & Pints DC: The Genius of Benjamin FranklinPenn Social, Washington, DC
Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Genius of Benjamin Franklin,” with Richard Bell, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-benjamin .]
Benjamin Franklin’s genius is a puzzle. Born the tenth and youngest son of a decidedly humble family of puritan candle-makers, his rise to the front ranks of science, engineering, and invention was as unexpected as it was meteoric. Despite having only two years of formal schooling, he would end up receiving honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews, as well as the 18th century’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Physics.
Like his hero, Isaac Newton, Franklin was driven by a perpetual dissatisfaction with the world as he knew it. He optimized, tinkered, and improved. Hardly the tortured genius, he took a schoolboy’s pleasure in everything he made. Experimenting was a constant source of beauty, pleasure, and amusement for him, even when things went wrong (which they did all the time).
In this talk Richard Bell will examine many of Franklin’s ideas to make life simpler, cheaper, and easier for himself and everyone else. It turns out that those ideas encompassed not only natural science and engineering—the kite experiments and the bifocals for which he is justly remembered—but also all sorts of public works, civic improvements, political innovation, and fresh new business ideas. His experimenter’s instinct, his relentless drive to build a better world one small piece at a time, even encompassed innovations in medical device design, in music, in cookery, and in ventriloquism.
Be on hand as Dr. Bell, a favorite of Profs and Pints fans who previously has given a host of excellent talks, returns to the stage to discuss what lessons—and great intellectual habits—we all can learn by examining Benjamin Franklin’s life. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk begins 30 minutes later.)
Image: Benjamin Franklin near a bust of Isaac Newton as painted by David Martin in 1767 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).
- Profs & Pints DC: Nosferatu Versus DraculaPenn Social, Washington, DC
Profs and Pints DC presents: “Nosferatu Versus Dracula,” on the rivalry between two versions of a vampire and its lasting impact on how we think of their kind, with Stanley Joseph Stepanic, who teaches a course on Dracula and vampire folklore as an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Virginia.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-nosferatu .]
The Robert Eggers remake of Nosferatu that was released to acclaim this past Christmas Day represents just the latest effort to bring this vampire to life. It’s tempting to credit the acclaimed German silent film director F.W. Murnau as the first to do so, but doing so obscures how much Murnau owed to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who continues on his own to pop up on the big screen every few years.
Come dig up the vampires beneath the vampires with the help of Dr. Stanley Stepanic, whose course on Dracula ranks as one of UVA’s most popular and who previously has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks.
He’ll discuss the folkloric origins of Stoker’s Count Dracula and how Nosferatu and its lead character Count Orlok fit into the picture. You’ll learn how these reimagined versions of long-feared undead beings helped cement the vampire’s status as one of the most enduring and prominent symbols of the human condition throughout the world.
Though considered a landmark of horror fiction today, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula was not initially a success. Stoker died in relative obscurity, remembered primarily for his contributions to theater operations and not his writing. What brought attention to the novel was a copyright lawsuit alleging that Murnau had essentially robbed Stoker’s grave by turning Dracula into his 1922 silent film Nosferatu.
The subsequent legal battle over the film and the media attention generated by it led Stoker's widow, Florence, to move forward with a dramatic production of Dracula which was first performed in England in 1924 and then on Broadway in the United States in 1927. These stage productions in turn led to the first proper film version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi and released in 1931.
Through such developments, Count Dracula evolved from a relatively minor villain that introduced little that was new to vampire literature into a popular culture phenomenon who has appeared in the media in countless forms. He and his various offspring will loom larger in your imagination as a result of this talk. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: From a 1922 German promotional poster for Nosferatu. Artist: Albin Grau.
- Profs & Pints DC: Horror as QueerPenn Social, Washington, 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 & Pints DC: The Great American Road TripPenn Social, Washington, DC
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)
