OCTOBER PROGRAMS
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
October 2 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Philip M. Nichols. His topic ‒ I Study Transnational Corruption, and I Am Optimistic About Our World.
Scholars in several disciplines have studied corruption around the world since the mid-1990s, when the World Bank lifted an implicit embargo of the subject. Their work shows that corruption distorts social and economic development, inflicting significant harm on people and the planet. Governments and other organizations cooperate in efforts to control it, with some loss of momentum since the 2008 financial collapse. For more than thirty years, Philip Nichols studied corruption and conducted fieldwork or aided anticorruption efforts all over the world apart from Antarctica. He explains what he’s seen past and present and tells us why he is optimistic about the near future.
Philip M. Nichols is the Joseph Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility in Business and a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Penn’s Wharton School, where he received twenty teaching awards. He served as president of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, and co-chaired the Anti-Corruption Law Interest Group, the International Economic Law Group, and UN/CEFACT LG, a United Nations expert committee on trade and development under the UN Economic and Social Council.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
October 6 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Dean Edwards is our Quarterback.
SPECIAL EVENT
Tuesday, October 7 from 6pm to 8pm
WRITER’S BLOCK GET-TOGETHER
In the spirit of our founding in 1902 as a gathering place for novelists, poets, scholars, and journalists, we are delighted to welcome the Barnes & Noble Writer’s Block group to the Club. This event continues our long tradition of fostering creativity, dialogue, and community among those who value the written word. Join us for an evening of lively conversation, thoughtful exchange, and literary camaraderie ‒ share your own work, seek inspiration, or simply enjoy the company of fellow lovers of literature.
Free Admission with wine, beer, non-alcoholic beverages, and light fare.
RSVP to renae@thefranklininn.com by Friday, October 3rd at noon.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
October 9 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Roger Allen. His topic ‒ The Best of Stories: Three Versions of the Joseph Narrative.
The story of Joseph endured and evolved in form and meaning as it moved across millennia, across differing faiths, and across literary traditions. Roger Allen gives us an account of the story as “narrated” in three versions ‒ the final chapters in the Biblical book of Genesis, the 12th surah (chapter) of the Qur’an, where the narrative is termed “the best of stories”, and a stained-glass window in the Chartres Cathedral in France. While the basic structure of the narrative is the same in all three sources, the differences in emphasis and presentation are intriguing.
Roger Allen served for 43 years as Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Penn. In 2009-10 he was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. He is the author of numerous studies in book and article form devoted to the Arabic literary tradition and is a translator of numerous contributions to the tradition of both modern and pre-modern Arabic narrative.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
October 13 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Skip Schwarzman is our Quarterback.
SPECIAL EVENT
Wednesday, October 15 from 6pm to 8pm
THE ART OF THE INN
Join us for an evening of art and conversation as Innmate Charles Austermuhl, chair of the Contents Committee, guides us through highlights of the Club’s collection, including works by painter Paul Wescott, cartoonist Arnold Roth, sculptors R. Tait McKenzie and Kenneth Gordon, and more. Among the treasures is one of the first pieces ever displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Presented by the Committee for New Initiatives, this event is the first of a member cultivation series. The Franklin Inn Club thrives on the energy of new members. We warmly, heartily, and enthusiastically encourage you to invite friends and colleagues to share in our community. Should they join us as Resident members, you’ll receive a $100 award in appreciation.
Free Admission with wine, beer, non-alcoholic beverages, and light fare.
RSVP to renae@thefranklininn.com by Friday, October 10th at noon.
Friday Club Dinner
October 17 with Member mixer at 5:30pm followed by presentation, with dinner at 7pm
Speaker is Drew Weissman. His topic ‒ From Vaccines to Therapeutics: The Future of mRNA Technology.
Development of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines depended on groundbreaking technology developed at Penn, using mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) to generate cellular production of proteins that provoke an immune response to the coronavirus. The vaccines have shown more than 90% efficacy and outstanding safety in clinical use. Now, as Drew Weissman and his lab team continue their vaccine research on a pan-coronavirus vaccine to stop the next coronavirus epidemic, a universal flu vaccine, and a herpesvirus vaccine, they are also working with Penn colleagues to develop cancer therapeutics.
Focusing on basic science, they aim to understand and develop new applications of the innovative technology which modifies one mRNA building block. Dr. Weissman explains the far-reaching potential of medical therapies using nucleoside-modified mRNA-LNP.
Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, is the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research at Penn. He was an eminent physician-scientist and pioneer in immunology long before becoming world-famous for the mRNA technology developed in collaboration with Katalin Karikó, PhD. For their discoveries, which enabled development of the COVID-19 vaccines, the two scientists received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
October 20 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Alina Macneal is our Quarterback.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
October 23 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Sophia Rosenfeld. Her Topic ‒ Our Freeing/Frustrating Age of Choice.
Sophia Rosenfeld’s new book, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025), is a sweeping history of the rise of personal choice, from shopping to voting to family planning. How have we come to the point where individual choice ‒ nationally and globally in consumer goods, in cultural offerings, in social relationships, in governance ‒ is emblematic of freedom? As a self-described historian of matters taken for granted, Sophia set out to explore that question, knowing personally how hard it can be to make up our minds when we face overabundant options. For guidance, she had philosophy, literature, and the work of scientists in new disciplines emerging at the turn of the 20th century, from psychiatry to economics. Her answers, she hopes, will be useful to historians, political theorists, psychologists, economists, and all of us who can be flummoxed when it comes to what to have for lunch.
Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at Penn. She is the author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2014), among other books. Her writing appeared in leading scholarly journals and in media such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Nation. She holds a BA from Princeton and a PhD from Harvard, and she taught at University of Virginia and Yale before coming to Penn. In 2014-15 at the Institute for Advanced Study, she researched how maximization of choice developed across the Atlantic world as a proxy for freedom in human rights and consumer culture. This year, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
October 27 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Russell Cooke is our Quarterback.
Tuesday Movie Night
October 28 at 6pm; feature at 6:30pm
Feature TBA
With snacks and drinks including light fare, popcorn, chips, nuts, soda, beer, and wine.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
October 30 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Katharina Galor. Her topic ‒ Out of Gaza: A Search for Understanding.
Katharina Galor draws on her book Out of Gaza: A Tale of Love, Exile, and Friendship (Potomac Books, 2025) to discuss the personal and political complexities of identity, migration, and human connection in the historical context of Israel-Palestine and beyond. The book grew from an unexpected long-distance friendship between Katharina, an Israeli academic, and Dima Mansour, a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan and Gaza during the 2014 Gaza War and later escaped to Belgium. At its core is Dima’s story and the bond formed by subject and author, one marked by Palestinian loss and exile and the other by Jewish trauma and persecution. The two women embarked on a relationship shaped by their harrowing histories and discovered how to transcend that impact.
Katharina Galor is a scholar of visual and material culture, cultural heritage, and gender in Israel-Palestine. She teaches at Brown University in the Judaic Studies Program and the Center for Middle East Studies. She wrote and edited numerous scholarly and interdisciplinary works, and published extensively on cultural heritage, spaces, and identity. Katharina taught and lectured in the United States, Germany, France, and Israel, speaking to audiences in and beyond academia on questions of history, memory, and the ethical stakes of cultural narratives.