Profs and Pints - Philadelphia

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “The Happiness Workshop,” a look at what recent research and centuries of wisdom tell us about bringing more joy and contentment to our lives, with Eric Zillmer, professor of psychology and the director of the Happiness Lab at Drexel University.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/happiness-workshop .]

Are you happy? If not, how do you get there?

Gain insights into happiness with Eric Zillmer, an award-winning teacher who leads a creative think tank that investigates the ingredients for happiness among individual people and communities.

You’ll learn how the study of happiness is a growing, evidence-based field known as positive psychology, which aims to find solutions to happiness challenges that can bring positive change to our lives and environments.

Dr. Zillmer will discuss the meaning of happiness and its place in our lives and society. He’ll draw from recent science and great thinkers in discussing how we can increase our own happiness and well-being, throwing out a few practical tips as well.

He’ll talk about whether happiness can be measured and where in our brain happiness is located. We’ll look at the influence of socializing and social media on our happiness and about the roles that music, humor, adversity, and regret have in happiness research.

Dr. Zillmer will discuss what we learn about happiness from competitive sports, and he’ll suggest ten actions that you can engage in that will make you happier.

Among the questions he’ll tackle: What is the happiest day of the week? Can a specific place make you happy? What can we learn about happiness from travelling the world? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3:30 pm. Talk starts at 4:30.)

Image: Happiness in the face of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. (Photo by Wonderlane / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “The Dark Side of Fairy-Tale Romance,” on the nightmarish elements of the tales we’ve repackaged as the stuff of lovers’ dreams, with Linda Lee, lecturer in folklore and fairy tales at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/fairy-tale-romance .]

From romcoms to reality TV shows to wedding venues to Valentine’s Day, we’re inundated with messages idealizing the idea of a “fairy-tale romance.” But the fairy tales underlying all the hype about charming princes, grand balls, true love’s kiss, and the happily-ever-after actually can be profoundly unsettling and full of reasons to run like hell.

Gain an appreciation of how modern society glosses over the darker elements of fairy tales with Linda Lee, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on witches and on Christmas folklore.

She’ll begin by discussing how much the idea of fairy-tale romance pervades mainstream media and popular culture, giving her audience a brief tour of fairy-tale romance tropes across genres and in movies, television, advertising, video games, and elsewhere.

It’s understandable that people might swoon over canonical fairy tales’ fancy dresses, crowded ballrooms, expansive libraries, and magical enchantments. But the romances at the core of the actual fairy tales often can be quite problematic, and we’ll also look at those.

“Cinderella,” for example, depicts women competing for male attention in ways that involve extreme measures like self-harm. Dead mothers, abusive stepparents, and family pressure to marry factor in as well.

In “Beauty and the Beast” a younger daughter is expected to sacrifice her future to rectify her father’s mistake. Other beastly elements of the tale: dubious consent, arranged marriages, anger management issues, monstrous love interests, isolation, manipulation, and possibly Stockholm syndrome.

In “Snow White” a young girl’s seemingly dead body is an object of desire, and we’re told of pedophilia, the threat of violence, cannibalism, necrophilia, and consent violation. “Sleeping Beauty” features a prince who believes he’s entitled to sexual access to a sleeping princess, as well as adultery, cannibalism, and abandonment.

You’ll come away with a deeper appreciation of the tales themselves and reason to roll your eyes at those who try to sell you on fairy-tale romance as an ideal. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A Jennie Harbour illustration of “Sleeping Beauty” from My Book of Favourite Fairy Tales, published in 1921. (Public domain.)

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Sex with Shakespeare,” a surprising look at how the Bard thought about gender and sexuality and how it influenced his works, with Abdulhamit Arvas, scholar and historian of sexuality and assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/sex-shakespeare .]

Before “gender” became a culture-war keyword, London audiences watched William Shakespeare’s plays with an open secret: Because women were barred from the public stage, every Juliet, Desdemona, and Rosalind was played by a boy actor.

What did that theatrical reality do to ideas of masculinity, femininity, desire—and to the plays themselves?

Hear such questions tackled in a talk that will use Shakespeare’s work as a vivid guide to a world whose assumptions about bodies, desire, and intimacy will seem both recognizable and surprisingly alien.

With sharp, accessible examples from Shakespeare’s plays and the histories around them, Dr. Arvas will trace how modern assumptions about gender and sexuality, as well as love, emerged over time. He’ll invite us to read Shakespeare not as a mirror of the present, but as a window to see how our thoughts about the body—and the meanings we attach to our body and its intimacies—all have a history.

Instead of treating Shakespeare as timeless, this talk will ask what his plays reveal about the historical ideas that once organized everyday life. It will discuss how bodies were classified, how difference was explained, what counted as normal, sinful, healthy, or “natural,” and why categories we take for granted today did not always exist in the same form.

We’ll look at whether Shakespeare’s world recognized anything like “sexual orientation” and whether the gender binary was as stable—or as important—then as it seems now. We’ll explore how religion, medicine, and law shape what people believed about sex and desire.

You’ll be invited to consider: What changed between then and now and why do those changes matter for how we read Shakespeare today? What was love back then? What is it today? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image by Canva