Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Macabre Poe,” a look at Edgar Allan Poe’s most gruesome and horrifying works and what inspired them, with Amy Branam Armiento, professor of English at Frostburg State University, past president of the Poe Studies Association, and editor of two books on the acclaimed American author.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-macabre-poe]

Stephen King has said that he and other horror writers are all “the children of Poe,” a reference to how they’re unable to escape his shadow. Although Edgar Allan Poe penned works in a long list of genres, including fantasy, detective fiction, and poetry, his most prominent legacy is as the master of the macabre. Over the nearly two centuries since Poe lived, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Masque of the Red Death” have haunted millions of readers.

Who, exactly, was Poe? Why does he remain as one of the United States’ best-known writers at home and abroad? Why do his works continue to resonate with readers more than 150 years after they were published?

Come hear such questions tackled by Amy Branam Armiento, a leading Poe scholar who edited More Than Love: The Enduring Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe, co-edited Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision, and formerly served as president of an international organization that supports the scholarly and informal exchange of information on Poe’s life, works, times, and influence.

Professor Armiento will look at which people and events influenced Poe’s literary works. His troubled life included the slow deaths of his mother, brother, foster mother, and wife, as well as a problematic relationship with alcohol and a difficult relationship with his foster father. All shaped his relationship with death, horror, and the unknown.

She'll also look at how Poe’s horror tales laid the groundwork for the characters, circumstances, and other conventions of horror stories. We’ll explore how Poe shattered literary conventions of his own time by embracing lurid descriptions of violence, especially violence perpetrated between family members and loved ones. You’ll learn how Poe adapted conventions of the fairy tale to create his memorable, haunting tales, an aspect of his work that is hidden in plain sight.

The presentation will also include examples of evocative artwork used to illustrate editions of Poe's works. Get ready to feel chills down your spine. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Poe as depicted in a modern retouched version of a daguerreotype by Mathew Benjamin Brady. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore presents: “Maintain Your Brain ,” a research-based guide to nurturing your brain and staying sharp as you age, with Dr. Majid Fotuhi, adjunct professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University’s Mind/Brain Institute and author of The Invincible Brain.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/metro-baltimore-maintain-brain-2 .]

Most people assume memory loss is inevitable with age, but that’s not the case. Dramatic leaps forward in brain research over the past decade have produced a host of both surprising and actionable findings related to brain health and resilience.

If you are concerned about your brain’s long-term health or looking after aging parents, you won’t want to miss this upcoming Profs and Pints talk. The speaker, Dr. Majid Fotuhi, is a neurologist and neuroscientist who has spent four decades studying Alzheimer's disease, memory, and the science of brain resilience. He developed a 12-week clinical program that has helped hundreds of patients improve on objective cognitive tests and experience MRI-confirmed increases in the volume of their hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning.

You’ll learn how the brain has a remarkable ability to grow new connections, increase in volume, and recover from years of neglect—a property called neuroplasticity. At the same time, even a single night of poor sleep causes a measurable buildup in the brain of amyloid, the protein linked to Alzheimer's.

Dr. Fotuhi will describe how our understanding of neuroplasticity has greatly increased since ten years ago, when the prevailing view in medicine was that the adult brain is essentially fixed, a finished product that could only decline with age. Thanks to subsequent clinical trial data we now know that what we eat, how we sleep, whether we exercise, how we manage stress, and how much cognitive stimulation we experience all directly reshape brain structure and function. Efforts to tend to these areas can improve memory scores and reverse early cognitive decline in people who were already showing Alzheimer’s symptoms.

These are not small effects seen in obscure journals. Many of these findings come from institutions like Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, and the National Institutes of Health, and they are reshaping how neurologists think about prevention and treatment.

Among the questions Dr. Fotuhi will tackle: Is Alzheimer's disease really preventable? Can you reverse early memory loss with lifestyle changes alone? Why does chronic stress quietly damage your brain even when you feel fine? (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 Baltimore presents: “Witches of Antiquity,” on the sorceresses of ancient Greece and Rome, with Barbette Stanley Spaeth, professor emerita of classical studies at William & Mary and scholar of magic and the supernatural in the ancient world.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-witches-of-antiquity ]

Seductive enchantress. Murderous sorceress. Corpse-mangling hag. The witches of the ancient world were among antiquity’s most vivid and disturbing characters.

Get to know some of antiquity’s most unforgettable women with the help of Barbette Stanley Spaeth, who last year gave fantastic Profs and Pints talks on ancient magic and ancient terrors of the night.

We’ll spend time with Homer’s beautiful Circe, Euripides’ passionate Medea, and Horace’s sinister Canidia. You’ll encounter Lucan’s terrifying Erictho, a witch so powerful she could raise the dead and force even the gods to obey her.

Along the way, we’ll ask why the image of the witch changed so dramatically as it traveled from Greece to Rome. Greek writers often imagined witches as beautiful, alluring, and sometimes even helpful. Roman authors, on the other hand, increasingly portrayed them as ugly, lustful, dangerous old women. What can these frightening figures tell us about ancient attitudes toward magic, women, sexuality, and power?

The answers take us beyond spells and potions into some of the deepest anxieties of the ancient world, about women who possessed power, men who feared losing it, and what might happen when accepted boundaries—between male and female, human and divine, living and dead, and even order and chaos—began to break down.

For over thirty years at William & Mary and Tulane University, Dr. Spaeth taught courses on ancient magic and the supernatural. She has published several studies of ancient witchcraft and is currently working on a book on the subject. Her talk is sure to leave you spellbound. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From “Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus,” an 1891 painting by John William Waterhouse (Gallery Oldham / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Haunted Landscapes of Middle-Earth,” on J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of horror, with Peter Grybauskas, who has written extensively on Tolkien and teaches courses on him at the University of Maryland and abroad in the UK.

[Doors open at 4:30 and the talk starts at 5:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-haunted-landscapes ]

Come on a tour of some of the spookiest sites in Tolkien’s invented world to learn where, how, and why the beloved author injected hearty doses of horror into his high fantasy. You’ll learn how Tolkien tapped into medieval sources, dreams, and his own war experiences to make Middle-earth frightfully real.

Your guide on this journey, Peter Grybauskas, is the editor of a volume of Tolkien’s scholarship and poetry, The Battle of Maldon (together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth) and author of A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas. He has wowed Profs and Pints fans in giving this talk in Washington D.C.

We’ll venture into the abandoned Mines of Moria, look out at the Dead Marshes, and explore other terrifying realms. From there, we’ll go on a haunted-hayride detour through Tolkien’s Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, a one-act play in which a young poet and an old farmer take a wagon out after dark to pick their way through a freshly-fought battlefield to find the headless body of their English lord.

Come for the jump scares, ghoulish sights and grisly discoveries. Stay for the profound exploration of the cost of war, the codes of chivalry, and the sources of poetic inspiration, all conveyed through some of Tolkien’s finest alliterative dialogue. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Tolkien drew from his memories of World War I battlefields like this one in creating the corpse-filled “Dead Marshes” of The Lord of the Rings. (Subsequently tinted November 1917 photo of Passchendaele by William Rider Rider/ Library and Archives Canada.)