What we’re about
Profs and Pints (https://www.profsandpints.com) 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, literature, law, economics, and philosophy. 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 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
Upcoming events (2)
See all- Profs & Pints Richmond: Peering into VolcanoesTriple Crossing Beer - Fulton, Richmond, VA
Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Peering into Volcanoes,” an exploration of one of nature’s most dramatic and unpredictable forces, with David Kitchen, associate professor of geology at the University of Richmond and expert on volcanoes, earthquakes, and natural disasters.
[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-volcanoes .]
The destruction of ancient Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius, the legendary 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and the silent threat of Yellowstone’s deep magma reservoirs all serve as reminders that tremendous power lurks beneath our feet.
Gain an understanding of volcanoes, the risks they pose, and scientists’ efforts to understand them with David Kitchen, a researcher of volcanoes and volcanic processes who has visited and studied active and ancient volcanoes across the world. His talk promises to blend cutting-edge science with real-world risk analysis and depictions of awe-inspiring natural beauty.
Dr. Kitchen will discuss how the restless movement of Earth’s plates gives rise to towering mountains of fire, explosive eruptions, and vast fields of molten rock. We’ll explore how volcanoes form, why they erupt, how magma rises from the mantle, and how different types of volcanoes grow.
You’ll learn what makes some eruptions far more dangerous than others and how modern science is working to predict and mitigate the devastating hazards volcanoes pose — including ash falls, lava flows, violent mud and debris flows, and lateral blasts. We’ll look at vivid case studies from America’s own active volcanic regions—the Cascades, Long Valley, Yellowstone, the Great Basin, and Alaska.
Come and discover the story of the fire beneath our feet and why it matters to us all. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: The January 2018 eruption of the Mount Mayon volcano in the Philippines. Photo by Darkimages08 / Wikimedia Commons.
- Profs & Pints Richmond: The Power of Folk HorrorTriple Crossing Beer - Fulton, Richmond, VA
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.
