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 ticket link provided in event descriptions) or at the door to the venue. Many events sell out in advance. Your indication on Meetup of your intent to attend an event constitutes neither a reservation nor payment for that event.
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 (2)
See all- Profs & Pints Nashville: Your Guide to GladiatorsFait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Your Guide to Gladiators,” a look at fact and fiction regarding the combatants of ancient Rome, with Chiara Sulprizio, senior lecturer in Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Gender and Sexuality in Juvenal's Rome.
[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-gladiators ]
Popular films like Spartacus and Gladiator have given gladiators an outsized place in our modern-day imaginings of ancient Rome. Contemporary film and television, however, often paint an inaccurate picture of the famed combatants’ lives inside the ancient arena.
Join Chiara Sulprizio, a scholar of ancient Roman society and culture, for a discussion of Roman gladiatorial culture that will separate fantasy from reality.Drawing from the most up-to-date archaeological research and literary scholarship, she’ll explore the origins of gladiatorial combat and the question of who became a gladiator, and why. You’ll learn the rules engagement in the arena as well as how often gladiators survived the battles they fought. We’ll also cover important Latin terms related to the games, to allow us to better understand how the games functioned and what purpose they served in Roman society.
Dr. Sulprizio will offer some broader reflections on why the Romans were so obsessed with gladiators that go beyond simple notions of “hyperviolence” or “bloodlust.”
Finally, she will consider why so many of us—especially those of us who think about the Roman empire almost every day—remain fascinated with gladiators today. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
Image: Part of a gladiator mosaic from about 320 A.D. on display at Rome’s Galleria Borghese (Wikimedia Commons).
- Profs & Pints Nashville: Antarctica 101Fait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Antarctica 101,” a look at life and research on the Earth’s frozen continent, with Dan Morgan, geologist, scholar of glaciers, and principal senior lecturer in Earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University.
[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-antarctica ]
Antarctica is the coldest, driest, highest, windiest, brightest, loneliest, most peaceful, and least explored continent on Earth. Come to a decidedly more comfortable environment—Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom—to gain a deep understanding of Antarctica and our efforts to explore it.
Your guide on this scholarly journey, Dan Morgan of Vanderbilt University, has been to Antarctica for six seasons of field research on the ice.
He’ll talk about the geologic history of Antarctica, its status as the world’s largest wildlife refuge, and why it’s central to our understanding of the global climate and ecosystem.
You’ll learn how Antarctica’s discovery more than 200 years ago helped motivate a golden age of its exploration and a race for the South Pole, with the key figures involved including the doomed Robert Falcon Scott and the death-escaping Ernest Shackleton. Dr. Morgan will talk about the treaty governing Antarctica and why it was the site of the first arms-control treaty signed during the Cold War.
You’ll get brought up to speed on current explorations and what it’s like to be living and camping there today. Motivating researchers who head there is a conviction that what happens in Antarctica affects all of us—Earth’s southernmost continent truly is at the heart of it all. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
Image: Emperor penguins and their young on the Antarctic ice. Photo by Giuseppe Zibordi (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
