Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Power of Folk Horror,” an exploration of an especially creepy subgenre in folklore and film, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-folk-horror .]

What makes a horror film scare really stick with you? Sometimes, it’s not monsters or jump-scares but the eerie feeling that something ancient, something forgotten, is still lurking just under the surface.

That’s the heart of folk horror, a subgenre that blends folklore, rural isolation, and rituals gone wrong. It takes the past—the truly forgotten past—and makes it come roaring back to bite us.

Venture into the strange and fascinating world of folk horror with Joshua Barton, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans with excellent past talks on cryptids, ghosts, movie monsters, and other things that go bump in the night.

We’ll start by digging down to folk horror’s roots in classic British films like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, discussing how these stories introduced us to secretive villages, ominous woods, and old traditions that clash violently with the modern world.

We’ll move on to explore how folk horror has reemerged in recent hits like The Witch, Midsommar, and Lamb. What ties them all together? The feeling that history isn’t dead; it’s just been waiting.

Beyond the scares, this genre taps into something deeper. Folk horror asks what happens when we lose touch with our roots or when we get too close to them. It reflects fears about identity, nature, belief, and the things we can’t explain. And in an age of environmental anxiety, political division, and cultural upheaval, these stories are more relevant than ever.

By the end of the lecture, we’ll see that folk horror goes beyond surface-level eeriness. It’s a mirror for our collective anxieties and a reminder that the past is never as far away as we think. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” with Brian A. Sharpless, licensed clinical psychologist, former faculty member at Penn State University and Washington State University, and author of Psychodynamic Therapy Techniques: A Guide to Expressive and Supportive Interventions.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-psychology-conspiracy .]

What exactly is a conspiracy theory? Are people who believe in conspiracies fundamentally different from those who do not? Are there any ways to protect yourself from buying into false theories? How often do conspiracy theories actually turn out to be true?

These are just a few of the fascinating questions that will be tackled by Brian Sharpless, a favorite of Profs and Pints fans, in a talk that has earned rave reviews from sold-out audiences in other cities.

Dr. Sharpless will discuss conspiratorial thinking throughout history, define what "conspiracy theory” means to psychologists and psychiatrists, and summarize what the field knows about the people who buy into conspiracy beliefs.

You may be surprised to learn that there are ways to predict who will believe in conspiracy theories, with some very common “cognitive biases” leaving people more accepting of them. Conspiracy theories also can provide short-term psychological benefits to the believer. Furthermore, a number of psychological traits and disorders – both common and rare – have been associated with conspiratorial thinking.

Perhaps most surprising, there are relatively few big differences between those who are predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories and those who aren't. It's small differences that sometimes have a huge impact on worldview.

The good news is that there are ways to evaluate – and even “inoculate” yourself against – conspiracy theories, and Dr. Sharpless will offer you practical tips on this front. You may walk out with a different perspective on what you read in the news and on the internet, with new knowledge that may help you maintain a more realistic and accurate worldview. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: An Airbus A340 jet emits contrails, the subject of conspiracy beliefs. (Photo by Adrian Pingstone / Wikimedia.)

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “How Our Brains Blind Us,” a look at our minds’ ability to skew what we and why we miss what’s right in front of us, with Arryn Robbins, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Richmond and cognitive scientist who researches visual attention.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-how-brains-blind .]

We like to think of vision as a reliable window into the world, but much of what we “see” is actually constructed by the brain, and much of our visual experience is filtered out without us even noticing.

Learn how visual attention works—and how it can fail us—with Dr. Arryn Roberts, who studies the interaction between the visual stream and representations in memory and whose investigates ways to improve the performance of professional searchers like radiologists, search-and-rescue teams, and airport baggage screeners.

Drawing from current research in visual cognition, neuroscience, and applied perception, she’ll discuss how attention guides perception and how we tend to miss even obvious things when our focus is elsewhere.

You’ll learn how expertise can change what we see (for better or worse) and why birdwatchers and radiologists literally see the world differently.

Dr. Robbins will cite interactive examples and demonstrations that reveal just how much we take for granted in what we “see.” She’ll discuss studies and experiments that have deepened our understanding of how visual perception works and leave you entertained by what we’ve been able to learn from chicken sexers and an experiment involving an “invisible” gorilla.

Important for life in a polarized, digital age, you’ll learn how the same brain processes that filter our vision can make us vulnerable to AI-generated image deception, and how you can train your eye to detect fakes.

It’s a talk you won’t want to miss. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From “Vertumnus,” a 1591 portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II by the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.