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: America's Erotic PastPenn Social, Washington, DC
Profs and Pints DC presents: “America’s Erotic Past,” a journey back through surprisingly queer and kinky centuries, with Rebecca Davis, professor of history and of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware and author of the acclaimed book Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-erotic-past .]
When Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring the existence of two biological sexes, he not only was putting his stamp on scientific errors, he also was contravening four centuries of American history.
We might assume that we live with a “puritan” legacy of repression. But America’s sexual history is full of gender-bending rebels, passionate queer lovers, and convention-defying radicals.
Join Dr. Rebecca Davis, the award-winning author of a definitive new history of sexuality in America, for a look at our nation’s complex sexual past and realities that get in the way of the Trump administration’s calls to delete any mention of “gender,” “queer,” and “transgender” from federal websites and historical markers.
She’ll bring to light the fascinating people, surprising intimacies, and iconic moments that illuminate this country’s erotic past, showing that the history that the administration wants to erase is too unpredictable—and its legacy too durable—to be undone by any executive order.
Among the things you’ll learn: What happened when a gender nonconforming servant shared a bed with an unmarried woman in the Virginia colony in the 1620s. How nineteenth-century Americans responded to same-sex intimacies. And what, exactly, was going on in Betty Dodson’s living room during her all-nude “Bodysex” workshops in the 1970s.
Prepare to be surprised by what happened behind the bedroom doors of yesteryear. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image by Canva.
- Profs & Pints DC: A Return to the Gilded AgePenn Social, Washington, DC
Profs and Pints DC presents: “A Return to the Gilded Age,” with Allen Pietrobon, assistant professor of Global Affairs at Trinity Washington University and former professorial lecturer of history at American University.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-gilded-age .]
Crippling economic crises. Fears related to immigration and disease. Income inequality. Corporate monopolies. Technological disruption. Big money unduly influencing politics. A few wealthy men seizing control of how most Americans exchanged information and got the news.
Sound like 2025? Actually, here we’re talking about America from 1875 to 1900.
Known as “the Gilded Age,” it was a crucial era of rapid industrialization, economic dislocation, social change and turbulence, and political turmoil. It set the United States on the path to becoming the most economically powerful country in the world while also creating an astronomical wealth gap between the rich and the poor.
Some enterprising Americans took advantage of economic disruption to succeed. Industrial tycoons like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies built unthinkably large business empires and then used their monopoly power to hold down wages and shut down competition. They deployed their vast profits to buy politicians, corrupting politics and tilting it and the economy in their favor.
Expansive new factories needed unskilled workers, who arrived via the largest wave of immigration in American history. New arrivals from Europe and Asia poured into rapidly expanding major cities, which came to be seen as rife with corruption and filled with squalor. As many American who were ill-equipped to compete in this new economy found themselves left behind, strikes broke out and labor violence, protests and counter-protests bloodied the streets. All the while Americans grew increasingly divided and angry at their political leaders.
Join award-winning professor Allen Pietrobon as he describes this tumultuous period and explores why this all sounds so familiar to us today. Among the questions he’ll answer: How did this period draw to a close? Might ours have a similar end? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: An 1883 cartoon from Puck magazine depicts rich robber barons being carried by the workers of their day (Library of Congress / Wikimedia).
- Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Labyrinth LoreCrooked Run Brewery (Sterling), Sterling, VA
Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Labyrinth Lore,” a mapping of tales of loss and of finding, 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-labyrinth-lore .]
Labyrinths and mazes have inspired and haunted mankind since King Minos forced the inventor Dadaleus to build one to contain his wife’s monstrous child, the Minotaur. Since then, the labyrinth has only continued to capture imaginations, appearing in novels, films, anime, self-help books, and, of course, actual landscapes.
Come take a journey through the labyrinths and mazes that captivate us with Brittany Warman of the Carterhaugh School, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans with her past talks on folklore, myths, and legends.
She’ll discuss how the Greek myth of the Minotaur made the labyrinth a place of terror but also adventure and triumph. Although the flesh-eating Minotaur devoured many Athenians, he was ultimately defeated by the hero Theseus, who used cunning (and a bit of help from Minos’ daughter Ariadne) to thwart the labyrinth’s design.
She’ll also explore Jim Henson’s cult-classic film Labyrinth, which takes place almost entirely within a maze that the film uses as both the physical location of a quest and a metaphor for growing up and into yourself.
Among other works she’ll venture into, Guillermo del Toro’s sinister film Pan’s Labyrinth features a labyrinth that stands between two worlds, fascist Spain and Faerie. In the dark magical girl anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica, labyrinths become the lairs of witches, spaces that are deadly but also profoundly personal and creative.
All of these labyrinths are deeply liminal. They are places of becoming, change, and possibility. What’s the difference between a labyrinth and a maze? Why are humans so obsessed with them in real life and in stories? Join Brittany to find out! (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The Minotaur in the Labyrinth depicted in an engraving on a 16th-century gem in the Medici Collection in the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (Wikimedia Commons).
- Profs & Pints DC: The Reverse Underground RailroadPenn Social, Washington, DC
Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Reverse Underground Railroad,” with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/dc-reverse-underground-railroad .]
What if the Underground Railroad had an evil counterpart that ran in the opposite direction and transported people from freedom to captivity? What if there was a black-market network of human traffickers and slave traders who made their livings by stealing away thousands of free African Americans from the northern states in order to sell them into slavery in the Deep South?
Believe it or not such a thing existed.
The most famous unwilling rider on this Reverse Underground Railroad was Solomon Northup, the author of Twelve Years a Slave and the subject of the Oscar-winning 2013 movie. But Northup was far from the only prisoner-passenger.
Over the first six decades of the nineteenth century, kidnappers stole thousands upon thousands of free black people, the vast majority of them children, from the streets of cities like Philadelphia. The victims were trafficked overland across the country, a journey of two million steps, and sold into slavery in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Join historian Richard Bell, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans, for a gripping, eye-opening talk in which he’ll reconstruct the Reverse Underground Railroad in all its horror.Dr. Bell will lay out the Reverse Underground Railroad’s origins and motives, as well as its scale and its spread. He’ll recover the lives of both the captors and captives. He’ll describe the routes the kidnappers took and the techniques they used to lure away free African Americans, and he’ll explain the dramatic impact these abductions had upon the growing antislavery fight. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The 1837 kidnapping of Peter John Lee, a free African American man from Westchester County, N.Y., by four men from New York City (The Anti-Slavery Almanac / Public domain.)
