Who's who | Independent Film Pro

flag-of-the-united-states-shot-from-a-low-angle-wi-2026-03-18-06-52-43-utc.jpeg

Watch ten minutes of the host, Oliver St. Clair Franklin, giving some insight into his life.

Dr James Alexander Dun
Associate Dean, Princeton

Alec is a historian of early America, focusing on race and identity, radicalism and revolution, and slavery and anti-slavery. He is the Associate Dean for Curriculum in the Office of the Dean of the College at Princeton University. He received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College, and his Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Princeton. His focus is the long 18th Century, broadening out from America to the Caribbean and the greater Atlantic Basin. He is the author of “Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and is currently engaged in a book project entitled “Landscapes of Freedom: Escaping Slavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic.” A regular scholarly essayist, book reviewer, guest lecturer, and interviewee, Alec has featured in Time Magazine and on The Morning Show, discussing contemporary politics and history.

Dr Ronald Angelo Johnson
Lynn Chair of History, Baylor University

Ronald holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Endowed Chair of History at Baylor University. He is the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (UGA Press, 2014) and Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025), which received the Honor Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the co-editor of the scholarly volume In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (UGA Press, 2021). His current book project is We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press): a diplomatic history of shared ideals of liberty between early Haitians and Americans.

Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Ph.D
Department of History (Emerita), Haverford College

Emma is Emerita Professor of History and Emeritus Curator of the Quaker Collection at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, where she continues to teach and consult. After a break in her undergraduate education to work in the Mississippi civil rights movement, she received her BA in History and Doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.Her research interests and publications include Quaker history, African-American history and the intersection between the two, plus Pennsylvania history, the American West, and various aspects of American social and material-culture history. She has helped to develop the Quakers of Color International Archive and has a rich history of publications. With Gary Nash and Clayborne Carson, she authored Struggle for Freedom, a college text on African American History. She is also a co-author on the Pearson Education high-school American History text and was a member of the team that revised the Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum. Emma is currently at work on a history of a Bryn Mawr Quaker family; a study of a mid-twentieth-century Philadelphia multi-cultural intentional community; and a biography of contemporary Quaker Chuck Fager, a self-described “investigative journalist.”

Adrienne Whaley
Director of Education and Community Engagement, Museum of the American Revolution

Adrienne is an educator and history lover who currently serves as Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Museum of the American Revolution. Adrienne earned her Bachelor's degree in African American Studies from Harvard University and her Master’s in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked in both art and history museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum. Adrienne loves the potential for objects, artifacts, and primary source documents to enrich student learning. She carries her love of history into her spare time as an avid genealogist researching her own family history, and as former Programming Chair and President of Philadelphia's African American Genealogy Group.

Dr Kelli Racine Barnes

Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow

Kelli is a scholar of early American-African American history, focusing on Black girlhood, transatlantic material culture, and the history of education. She earned her Ph.D. in History and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Delaware, where she was an African American Public Humanities Fellow. Currently employed by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and consulting for the National Park Service, Kelli is researching the Revolutionary era freedom seekers with a focus on girls and women of African descent. She is a lecturer, conference presenter and frequent podcaster, recently sitting on advisory committees for The School District of Philadelphia, The Rosenbach Museum, and the Webb Deane Stevens Museum. She was a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2026) and has extensive experience in Digital Humanities. Recent publications include: "(In)Visible Architects of Freedom: African Americans in Early Philadelphia," 2024, and “The ‘Radical Imaginations and Everyday Anarchy’ of Black Girl Needleworkers in Antebellum Connecticut”, 2023.

Dr. Tara A. Bynum
Associate Professor, University of Iowa

Tara is an Associate Professor of English & African American Studies and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800. She received her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Political Science from Barnard College. Her current monograph, Reading Pleasures (University of Illinois Press’ New Black Studies, 2023), examines the ways in which 18th Century enslaved and/or free men and women feel good or experience pleasure in spite of the privations of slavery or white supremacy. This work is part of a larger, ongoing project that thinks more deeply about how black communities in the early Republic made and shaped the very meaning of nation-building in the greater New England area and beyond. Related essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: Early American Literature, Common-Place, Legacy, J19, Criticism, American Periodicals, and African American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1, 1750-1800.

Jennifer Lee Gray
Education & Museum Manager, Arch Street Meeting House

Jennifer has 15 years’ experience in public history and museum education, working at sites such as Eastern State Penitentiary, Liberty Hall Museum & Gardens, and the Betsy Ross House. She joined the staff at Arch Street Meeting House in 2021 and holds a BA in History and an MA in Education, both from Arcadia University.

Craig Bruns
Chief Curator, Independence Seaport Museum

Craig has held this position for the last 14 years, overseeing the Museum’s collections and archives, the J. Welles Henderson Research Center, and the preservation and interpretation of the Olympia and the Becuna. He has held multiple positions at the Museum over 28 years, and has also been involved in the planning and execution of 62 exhibits and a Collections Discovery and Reorganization Project, which allows the public broader access to the Museum’s archival and historical artifacts. Most recently, he led the reevaluation of the museum’s famous William Rush carved figurehead, Mary (aka Peace), revealing she was a 1820s contemporary portrait of Rush’s daughter, which in turn led to her being remounted as she was originally intended to be seen. Craig holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA from Temple University, Tyler School of Art.

David Brigham
Librarian and CEO of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

David is the CEO of one of America's most important archival collections, which includes 21 million documents spanning centuries. He joined the Historical Society of Pennsylvania after a 10-year tenure as CEO of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. David earned his undergraduate degrees in English and Accounting at the University of Connecticut and his Master’s and Ph.D. in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania and he is the editor of Two Hundred Years: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1824-2024 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and author of Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

Sean Quimby

Associate Vice Provost and Director, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania

Sean’s portfolio extends beyond the Kislak Center and includes the Library at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, and the University Archives and Records Center. He received his training in the history of technology as a Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware and in library and information science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Broadly speaking, his research interests lie in modern archives, and the conceptual, ethical, legal and technological challenges that they pose to researchers and the institutions that steward them. He began his career at Stanford University, where he oversaw the papers of polymath and technological utopian Buckminster Fuller. As the Director of Syracuse University’s Special Collections Research Center, he led the multi-national Marcel Breuer Digital Archive project, and developed and taught courses, exhibitions, programs and publications. Between 2014 and 2020, he was the Director of Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where he worked to acquire, preserve and activate media-rich archives.

Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness
Mother Bethel

Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness represents a powerful legacy of faith and service as a fourth-generation preacher who answered her call to ministry at just 14 years old. Educated at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City and Union Theological Seminary, she brings a unique blend of theological training and practical experience, having worked on Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign before her ordination as an Itinerant Elder in the AME Church. Her journey culminated in a historic milestone when she was appointed as the 53rd Pastor of Mother Bethel AME Church, making her the first woman to lead the birthplace of African Methodism, which sits on the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by African Americans in the United States. She became the first female president of the Main Line Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the first African American female president of the Rotary Club of Ardmore and her extensive board service and interfaith work reflect her philosophy of being a bridge connecting people and resources to build beloved community, living by her guiding principle, "Only what you do for Christ shall last."

Michelle Craig McDonald

Expert in Atlantic History

Michelle has worked for nearly three decades as an educator and administrator in university settings, museums and historic sites. Her research focuses on trade and consumer behavior in North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries, especially the history of coffee, and has been supported by grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Harvard Business School, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Winterthur Museum & Library. Her most recent book, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

Brent White

Musician and Scholar

Brent is a Philadelphia-based trombonist, educator, and scholar whose work connects performance, history and Black American cultural traditions. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University and a longtime member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, appearing on the ensemble’s 2026 Grammy-nominated album Lights on a Satellite. Through performance, teaching, and research, Brent has explored the life, music, and legacy of Francis Johnson, the pioneering 19th-century Black composer and bandleader.

Rob McNelly

Rob is the Captain of the Color Guard of the The Pennsylvania Society of Sons of the Revolution. Its members are direct descendants of officers and private soldiers who fought in the War of the Revolution from 1776 onwards. Founded in 1898, their mission is to keep alive the patriotic spirit of the men who, in the military, naval and civil service and by their acts and counsel, achieved American Independence. He is also an attorney practicing in Philadelphia and the surrounding area.

Laura C. Keim

Stenton Curator

Laura is a Curator and Lecturer in historic preservation at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an M.S. from Penn’s preservation program, an M.A. in early American culture from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program, and an A.B. in Art History from Smith College. Her latest book chapter is “Hierarchies of the Home: Spaces, Things, and People in the Eighteenth Century,” in At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, edited by Stephen Hague and Karen Lipsedge. She recently published a shellwork grotto box “Object Lesson” in Jon Stobart’s online edited volume, Global Goods and the Country House, and has also published “Searching for Black Lives: Re-Membering and Re-Voicing Stenton’s Black Community and Family” in the Journal of Family and Community History. Her research interests include architecture, decorative arts, and the material culture of the Atlantic world in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, as well as the history of collecting and reinvention of the past in the 20th Century.

Jeremy Johnson Cultural Education

Director, Delaware Tribe of Indians

Jeremy is the Cultural Education Director and citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He is Lenape, Shawnee and Peoria and a descendent of the Maynor, Watters, Longbone, Skye, Wilson, and Curlyhead families. Before his current role, he served on Delaware Tribal Council and worked for over 18 years as a middle school and high school English teacher and coach. He is committed to preserving and revitalizing Lenape culture and language for future generations of his tribe.