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: Becoming the WitchFait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Becoming the Witch,” on witchcraft initiations in folklore and fairy tales, with Cory Thomas Hutcheson, folklorist, lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University, and author of New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic.
[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-becoming-the-witch .]
Becoming one of the witches of folklore was never as simple a matter as learning a few spells or grabbing a pointy hat. It required a lot more effort than that.
Among the paths some took to get there: Striking a deal with a sinister figure standing at a crossroads. Venturing into a dark forest—with only a doll for protection—to confront a cannibalistic witch. Shooting the moon with a silver bullet to make it bleed magic into you.
Folklore is riddled with methods for becoming a witch, and by coming to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom on October 30th you can learn where these stories come from and what they tell us about the nature of witches and folk sorcery.
Cory Thomas Hutcheson, a folklorist whose several excellent past talks have earned him a substantial following among Profs and Pints fans, will explore the lore of witch initiations found in folklore, fairy tales, historical accounts, and other sources.
We’ll look at the three key methods by which people become witches: being born into witchery, or being called into it, or learning it through study and practice. You’ll meet examples of sorcerous folk.
We’ll also examine the unique challenges, ethical questions, allies, enemies, and opportunities faced by newly made witches in places ranging from Appalachia to Ukraine.
If you want to gear up for Halloween by learning about all things witchy, you couldn’t ask for a better teacher than Dr. Hutcheson, who along with writing New World Witchery hosts a podcast by the same name and edited Llewellyn’s Complete Book of North American Folk Magic.
If on the way home you encounter a black goat who asks, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” you’ll have a better sense of the consequences of your reply. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
Image: From “The Witches’ Sabbath,” painted by Francisco Goya (Museo Lázaro Galdiano / Wikimedia).
- Profs & Pints Nashville: Southern Gothic HorrorFait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Southern Gothic Horror,” on regional tales that keep us awake at night, with Stephanie A. Graves, scholar of horror and lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State 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/southern-gothic-horror. ]
From the AMC series Interview with a Vampire to the enormously popular film Sinners, works aptly classified as Southern Gothic horror grip the popular imagination like a hand thrust up from a moss-covered grave.
But what exactly makes film or literature Southern Gothic, and what makes horror that intersects with it so unsettling?
Learn the answers to such questions by venturing into this dark realm of the imagination with Stephanie Graves, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on sex and the horror film and on Christmas frights.
We’ll explore the Southern Gothic as a stylistic mode that has influenced broader horror traditions. We’ll also look at how it amplifies horror’s ability to unsettle by rooting fear in familiar soil, using the landscape of the South as both setting and spectral presence.
Graves will discuss how the classic Gothic literature that arose around in the castles and abbeys of Europe found its way across the Atlantic and adapted to the haunted landscapes of the American South. Part genre, part style, and part setting, the Southern Gothic flourished here by drawing from the inescapable presence of what lies buried, whether literally in the grave or figuratively in cultural memory.
Southern Gothic horror highlights horror’s preoccupation with fear, dread, and the supernatural. It uses ghost stories, monstrous figures, and eerie rituals not only to entertain but also to expose deeper cultural anxieties related to class, race, gender, violence, and place. It continues to thrive as a cultural space where the spooky and supernatural entwine with history, memory, and dread. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)
Image: A family grave site at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. (Photo by Ron Cogswell / Creative Commons.)
