Profs and Pints - Nashville

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Houses that Haunt Us,” on dwellings portrayed as home to our worst fears, with Stephanie Graves, associate professor of English at Columbia State Community College and scholar of horror and the Gothic.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-houses-that-haunt ]

We typically associate houses with safety, privacy, family, and stability. But the horror genre flips them into something entirely different, transforming them into places of danger, secrecy, entrapment, and terror.

Get a grand tour of haunted houses—and explore what makes them so frightening—with Stephanie Graves, who has built a loyal following among Nashville’s Profs and Pints fans with her excellent past talks on various aspects of horror.

She’ll discuss how the power of haunted houses to unsettle us arises from a paradox: Houses are supposed to be places that shelter you from bad things, not the places where bad things dwell. If you can’t retreat to a house, where can you go?

We’ll explore the long literary and filmic history of the haunted house, tracing their connection to Gothic castles and nineteenth-century ghost stories, and how they’ve changed as a result of changing ideas about family, property, class, gender, and domestic life. We’ll consider why haunted houses, in their preoccupation with the past, culturally signify places full of buried secrets, unresolved violence, and histories that refuse to stay hidden.

Our tour of haunted real estate will take us to the dwellings in The Haunting of Hill House, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Shining, and The Haunted Mansion, as well as more recent horror films like Barbarian and Hell House, LLC.

The talk will leave you with plenty to think about after you’ve gone home. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Blood, Brass, and Ink,” on how Black military service served as an engine for Black liberation, with Marquita Reed-Wright, assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University and teacher of courses on the African American experience.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-blood-brass-ink ]

As our nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence it confronts a sharp paradox: Many of those who laid their bodies on the line for our Republic were Black service members whose humanity it had actively denied.

Learn how Black soldiers’ fights on battlefields intertwined with the Blacks struggle for basic civil rights at home from Dr. Marquita Reed-Wright, an advocate of public history who teaches employs material culture and deep storytelling in teaching it.

Her talk will take her audience through three distinct conflicts—the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II—using historical objects and literature. It will pair frontline veterans and their physical artifacts with revolutionary Black women writers who preserved what official archives tried to erase.

We’ll look at Revolutionary War patriot Prince Hall’s military record and freedom petitions and the anti-tyranny verse that Phillis Wheatley used to challenge the founding rhetoric of 1776.
We’ll examine a brass uniform button recovered from the Civil War and delve into the Civil War camp diaries of Susie King Taylor, a documenter of combat, literacy, and Reconstruction.

The combat ribbon earned by Medgar Evers in fighting in Europe in World War II will set the stage for a discussion of how the postwar literature of Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Childress captured the fury of those fighting Jim Crow.

Attendees will discover how Black service members transformed the tools of warfare into civil-rights campaigns. The talk will conclude by connecting these historic battles directly to modern debates over voting rights and public memory, showing how the generation-spanning struggle to hold America accountable to its founding promises remains vital today. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Medgar Evers in uniform during World War II (U.S. Army photo/ public domain).