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 [email protected].
Thank you for your interest in Profs and Pints.
Regards,
Peter Schmidt, Founder, Profs and PInts
Upcoming events (1)
See all- Profs & Pints Nashville: When Christmas Summoned GhostsFait la Force Brewing, Nashville, TN
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “When Christmas Summoned Ghosts,” on the centuries-old English tradition of telling terrifying tales during the holiday season, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University and scholar of horror.
[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://profsandpints.ticketleap.com/graves/ ]
Sure, it can be nice to give presents or sing carols at Christmastime. But when was the last time you gave someone the gift of being scared out of their wits?
Come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to rediscover—and perhaps help revive—the venerable English custom of telling ghost stories during the season’s long nights. Your guide on this spooky journey, Stephanie Graves, has given fantastic Profs and Pints talks on horror films, and she promises to delight her audience in tracing the origins, peak, and legacy of spooky Christmas tales.
While Charles Dickens’ ghost tale, A Christmas Carol, is well known, many people are unaware that it’s part of a narrative tradition dating back centuries. As Graves will explain, it’s rooted in fireside tales of sprites, goblins, and other Yule monsters told at least as far back as the fifteenth century as a means of passing dark winter hours.
The development of accessible and popular print culture helped such tales spread far and wide, and nineteenth century Victorian England fully embraced the Christmas ghost story as a way commingle Christmas festivities with the eerie allure of the supernatural. Often read aloud in homes or shared at social gatherings, such ghost stories became a key part of Christmas entertainment, blending the coziness of holiday gatherings with an unsettling air of Gothic mystery.
Graves will discuss how such stories often featured ghostly visitations, moral lessons, and themes of redemption, reflecting the era's fascination with the afterlife, spiritualism, and the darker side of human nature. Leaning into the Christian ideology that undergirded Victorian society, they reinformed the idea that Christmas is a time for reflecting on past deeds and embracing the possibility of change. Dickens was joined by authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle in popularizing and capitalizing upon such tales.
You’ll learn how the tradition of the Christmas ghost story remains influential in holiday storytelling, inspiring both writers and filmmakers to this day. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image by Canva.
