MARCH PROGRAMS
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
March 2 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Eric Orts is our Quarterback with special guest Zeke Emanuel.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
March 5 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Charles McMahon. His topic ‒ What Franklin Teaches Us About Character and Narrative.
Charles McMahon is the director of the comedic play Franklinland at the Lantern Theater Company. Written by Lloyd Suh, Franklinland moves beyond Benjamin Franklin the inventor, the scientist, the statesman, the founder of innumerable civic institutions by focusing on his sage understanding of human nature and how he used this knowledge to create characters and narratives influence events to achieve pivotal outcomes in matters both personal and global.
Co-founder of Lantern Theater Company in 1984, Charles McMahon serves as its artistic director since inception. In Lantern’s 32 seasons, he’s overseen staging of more than 140 productions and directed 40+ plays, including at least 20 by William Shakespeare. Charles holds a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The Philadelphia premiere of Franklinland runs from May 7 through June 7.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
March 9 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Patrick Keough is our Quarterback.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
March 12 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Peter Gould. His topic ‒ Economics and the Future of Heritage.
At a time of accelerating social, political, and cultural change, organizations and even national economies face serious challenges to the enterprise of preserving cultural heritage. These include heritage-dependent economic development, political intrusions into heritage management, the impact of political and climate crises on heritage, the tensions arising at museums and heritage sites when costs rise while funding diminishes and public expectations change, and the consequences of government efforts to devolve control and financing for resources. Peter explores the economic realities of these challenges and the potential use of economic tools to address them.
Peter Gould holds a PhD in archaeology from University College London (UCL) and degrees from Penn and Swarthmore. Early in his career, he worked as an economist and economic journalist and served as principal administrator of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Carter administration. In a three-decade career as an investor and corporate executive, Peter chaired boards of cultural institutions including the Philadelphia Zoo and the Highmark Mann Center. Currently he chairs the Penn Museum’s Board of Advisors. He is a partner and CFO of DigVentures, a UK social enterprise focused on public participation in archaeology and heritage projects. His published works include four books relating to archaeology and economic development including textbook Essential Economics for Heritage (UCL Press, 2025). Peter also taught at Penn and the American University of Rome.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
March 16 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Leslie Whipkey is our Quarterback.
Friday Club Dinner
March 20 with Member mixer at 5:30pm, presentation at 6:15pm, followed by dinner
Speaker is Kathleen Brown. Her topic ‒ Encumbered Liberty: The Legacy of Gradual Abolition for Black Philadelphians.
Soon after the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, Philadelphia became the city with the largest free Black population of the antebellum period, home to the first African Methodist Episcopal Church and to a bold interracial abolition movement. However, neighbors Maryland and Delaware where slavery was legal became the source of a grim threat in the city. Enslavers and slave catchers regularly crossed the borders to hunt down Black people they claimed had “stolen” themselves from slavery as University of Pennsylvania’s medical school trained thousands of white doctors from southern slave-owning families. Kathleen’s presentation focuses on how these conflicting legacies shaped the lives of Black Philadelphians and their white allies in the drive toward abolition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Kathleen M. Brown is the David Boies Professor of History at Penn, where she served as the lead faculty historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. Her research and teaching interests center on the historical intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and labor in colonial North America, the early United States, and the Atlantic world of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She is the author of three prize-winning books: Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996); Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009), and Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition (Penn Press, 2023).
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
March 23 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Franklyn Rodgers is our Quarterback.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
March 26 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Peter Conn. His topic ‒ Considering Franklin’s Autobiography.
While there’s never a bad time to consider The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the semiquincentenary of American independence presents a particularly good moment. Links and prompts to be sent in advance to prepare for the day’s discussion.
Peter Conn, the Club’s immediate past president, retired from Penn as Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Professor of Education. His newest book Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America was published by The American Philosophical Society Press in 2025. Other publications include Adoption: A Brief Social and Cultural History (2013), The American 1930s: A Literary History (2009), Literature in America (1989), and The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (1983). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (1996), received the Athenaeum Literary Award and was listed in Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Peter also edited the Penn Reading Project edition of the Autobiography that marked Franklin’s 300th birthday.
New Initiatives Salon
Friday, March 27 from 6pm to 8pm
For the Common Good: the Women Who Shaped Our Nation.
For the intellectually curious and aesthetically attuned with emphasis on immediacy and shared experience, the New Initiatives Salon is a curated gathering where writers, performers, artists and creative thinkers present their work, exchange ideas, and cultivate dialogue in an intimate setting.
In celebration of Women’s History Month, join us for cocktails and conversation with a selection from the nine-part docuseries For the Common Good: the Women Who Shaped Our Nation. Featuring Historian and Stenton Curator Laura Keim along with Innmates Mickey Herr and Cordelia Biddle.
What does it take to embrace a fuller concept of what it took to shape our nation? How did women ‒ 50% of the founding generation ‒ have an impact? Laura, Mickey and Cordelia guide our discussion addressing this question. Individually they have spent time deep in historical archives uncovering documentation, and sometimes reading between the lines, to find the stories few have ever heard.
About the Presenters:
As curator of Stenton, historian Laura Keim brings 25+ years of insight into the impacts of expanding the narrative beyond the male-focused stories we often tell in such spaces. Her recent work on the Dinah Memorial Project and current project “Wrestling with Justice: Quakers and Northern Slavery” helped transform Stenton, a museum over 125 years in the making, in unexpected ways.
For the Common Good executive producer Mickey Herr is a writer and public historian. Originally researching colonial-era Pennsylvania women for a project for The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, For the Common Good grew into a partnership with You’ll Never Forget Productions, formerly known as History Making Productions.
Author Cordelia Biddle, a feminist and historian, has long drawn on her twin passions in both her works of fiction and non-fiction. She recently gave voice to the women of the Bible in Listen To Me, The Women of the Bible Speak Out.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
March 30 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Dean Edwards is our Quarterback.
Tuesday Movie Night
March 31 at 6pm; feature at 6:30pm
Feature TBD.
With snacks and drinks including light fare, popcorn, chips, nuts, soda, beer, and wine.