FIC FEBRUARY PROGRAMS
February 2, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Speaker is Barry Gross, from Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath. His topic – Lessons Learned from the Defense in High-profile Cases.
Barry Gross is senior counsel in the white-collar defense and investigations group at Faegre Drinker. Before joining the firm in 2007, he served for 24 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Easterm District of Pennsylvania, where he prosecuted organized crime and public corruption cases. Among his cases during those 24 years was the trial of four La Cosa Nostra bosses and an investigation of the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
Barry was elected as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and has been recognized by Chambers USA in the category of Litigation: White-Collar Crime and Government Investigations. He has led more than 200 federal and state jury trials to verdict and has argued appeals in the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Most recently, he secured the acquittal of Dawn Chavous, Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson’s wife, after a five-week federal trial on public corruption charges. In 2018 he defended at trial a businessman charged in the Congressman Chaka Fattah case. In 2014, after a five-month federal trial on charges of racketeering securities fraud, he won an acquittal for a securities lawyer based in New York City. The charges concerned the takeover of a publicly traded Texas mortgage company by a group led by “Little Nicky” Scarfo, son of former mob boss Nicodemo Scarfo.
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February 6, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Ruth Morelli is our Quarterback.
February 9, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Speaker is William R. Valerio, director of the Woodmere Art Museum. His topic – George Biddle Rediscovered: The Main Line Scion Whose Art Bore the Stamp of Social Justice.
Woodmere’s major exhibition of George Biddle’s work ended in January, but director and CEO William Valerio anticipates a future show of drawings discovered in the artist’s studio, now preserved by his son in Croton-on-Hudson, NY. Valerio found many drawings of combat and ruin that Biddle made during WWII, and notably, pieces from a portfolio of work done at the Nuremberg trials on assignment for Look magazine in 1946. Biddle’s sylistic influences included the realism of PAFA’s “Eakins curriculum” and the political expressionism of Mexican muralists. His accomplishments in multiple mediums – painting, drawing, lithography, etching, murals – were masterful. And his impact as a champion of public art survives. (He served on several federal arts commissions from the 1930s into the 1950s.)
William R. Valerio is the Patricia Van Burgh Allison Director and CEO of Woodmere Art Museum, which is dedicated to artists of Philadelphia. During his 12-year tenure, Woodmere has become an increasingly vital and diverse presence in the region’s cultural life, with steady increases in attendance, membership, and community involvement. Through his work on exhibitions, education programs, and such initiatives as the digitization of the collection, he has raised the visibility of Philadelphia’s art and creative history. Dr. Valerio graduated from Williams College and earned an MA from Penn and a PhD from Yale in art history. He also holds an MBA from Wharton in strategic management and marketing. Prior to his appointment at Woodmere, he was assistant director for administration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a 1991 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
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February 13, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Gresham Riley is our Quarterback.
February 17, Friday Club Dinner, starting with cocktails at 5:30 p.m.
Speaker is Vincent Kling, professor of German and French at La Salle University. His topic—The Stream of Time: Beginning, Middle, and End in Modernist Experimental Literature.
In this sequel to our 2022 programs honoring the centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Vincent Kling will explore what made, and still makes, 20th-century modernist literature challenging to many readers: It rearranges linear chronology. Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others tell gripping stories but handle time very differently from predecessors like Dickens or Balzac. The modernists found precedent in other earlier authors, though, like Laurence Sterne, Henry James, or Ambrose Bierce. We will look at stories told backward, stories frozen in time, stories overlapping in different eras, with years passing in a flash and decades contained in a single moment.
Vincent Kling is a professor of German and French at La Salle University, an essayist, and an award- winning translator of fiction, poetry, and critical writing by German literary figures. He has published essays on experimental techniques in modernist fiction, on the persistence of literary tradition, on detective fiction, and on the craft of translation. His translation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s The Woman without a Shadow, in both its forms as drama and as novella, will be published later this year.
Video: To see a recording of this presentation, click on Play Event. Click on the play button at the bottom left of the screen that comes up to see the presentation. To see Closed Captions, move your cursor to the lower right corner of the video to see available options, click on the “cc” icon, and then click on the “English (auto-generated) cc” option in the pop-up menu.
February 20, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Matthew McGovern is our Quarterback.
February 21, A Special Tuesday Evening Buffet, starting at 6:30 p.m. Plato at the Franklin Inn: Dialog and Dinner with Drexel Students
Innmate Paula Marantz Cohen brings students from Drexel’s Pennoni Honors College to the Inn for a buffet dinner and discussion with members over Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, which deals with the devolution of regimes from aristocracy to tyranny. Paula and her colleague, Jonathan Deutsch, invite you to join them and find connections with Plato’s ideas to our current political situation. (You’ll receive a reading assignment in advance.)
Paula is dean of the Pennoni Honors College and a distinguished professor of English at Drexel. She is the author of six nonfiction books on literature, film, and culture. Her six novels include the best- selling Jane Austen in Boca and a thriller based on the James family, What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. Her essays have appeared in The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Times Literary Supplement, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature from 2003 to 2022.
Jonathan Deutsch is a professor of nutrition sciences, and food and hospitality management at Drexel. He is the founding director of the Drexel Food Lab, which focuses on research and development to solve problems of food insecurity and food waste. He has written or edited eight books and numerous articles in journals of food studies, public health, and hospitality education. A classically trained chef, he holds a PhD in food studies and food management from New York University , an associate’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America, and a BS from Drexel.
February 23, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Speaker is Jay Robert Stiefel. His topic – Who Wanted What: A First-hand Account of Craft and Commerce in Colonial Philadelphia.
Historian, author, attorney, and collector Jay Stiefel discovered a treasure in 1999 that drew him ever deeper into the history of Philadelphia’s artisans and craftsmen in the first half of the 18th century. In a collection of papers at the American Philosophical Society, spanning seven generations of the Vaux family, Jay found the account book of master cabinetmaker John Head. Its pages provide the earliest and most complete records from any cabinetmakers in British North America or Great Britain, telling the story of Head’s 35-year working life as a prominent, successful artisan and merchant. Head came to Philadelphia from England in 1717, but he had been “lost” to history. His detailed day-by-day entries for thousands of transactions provide not only the records of furniture he created for his customers, but also an account of a robust pre-Revolution economy created by Philadelphia’s artisans and merchants – buying, bartering, building a path to prosperity.
Jay will tell us how his research on this rich document helped him write an intimate, detailed social history of talented artisans and successful merchants, and an essential reference work on Philadelphia’s furniture and material culture in the era. His book is The Cabinetmaker’s Account: John Head’s Record of Craft & Commerce in Colonial Philadelphia, 1718-1753, commissioned, underwritten, and published in 2019 by the American Philosophical Society. (Copies will be available for purchase.) Jay is an authority on the crafts and commerce of colonial Philadelphia. He studied history at Penn and at Christ Church, Oxford. In February 2019, Oxford honored him as a North American alumni author for publication of The Cabinetmaker’s Account.
Video: Because of technical difficulties, a similar recorded presentation at the America Philosophical Society is linked here. Play Event. Click on the play button at the bottom left of the screen that comes up to see the presentation. To see Closed Captions, move your cursor to the lower right corner of the video to see available options, click on the “cc” icon, and then click on the “English (auto-generated) cc” option in the pop-up menu.
February 28, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Roberta Kangilaski is our Quarterback.