There is no one path to breaking into the art industry, but for Jenna Gilley, the journey has included internships with the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the UrbanArt Commission, as well as travel to Meknès, Morocco, where she learned about the city’s arts communities.

Dr. Michael LaRosa, associate professor of history and 2019 winner of Rhodes’ Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Research, has produced a significant body of scholarship on Latin American history and culture as well as U.S.-Latin American relations. His latest book is Immigration in the Visual Art of Nicario Jiménez Quispe.

When senior business major Bryce Berry arrived in Memphis in 2016 as a first-year from St. Louis, little did he know that his college journey would take him to Cape Town, South Africa. As a result of winning a merit-based scholarship allowing students to obtain work experience in a foreign country, he was a finance intern for the nonprofit organization Gold Youth. He describes it as an unforgettable experience that has equipped him with life and career skills.

Prof. Victor Coonin’s students arrive at his courses with a certain amount of knowledge of Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of David, but they might not be as familiar with an earlier “David,” one wrought in bronze by the sculptor Donatello, who is credited with helping to usher in the Renaissance style. Prof. Coonin has published a book that is being described as the first thorough biography of the Florentine sculptor in 25 years.

U.S. News & World Report has named Rhodes College one of the nation’s most innovative national liberal arts colleges in its 2020 Best Colleges rankings. Rhodes was also recognized as a “Best Value College” and on the list of national liberal arts colleges with the “Best Undergraduate Teaching Degrees.”

Electric guitars. Snake skin. The noise of early punk rock colliding with the Greek myth of Medusa. These were the sights and sounds of the McCoy Theatre over Labor Day weekend, when playwright Krista Knight and New York musician and composer Barry Brinegar came to campus to work with the Rhodes College cast on the upcoming Memphis premiere of HISSIFIT.

Rhodes chemistry professor Dr. Mauricio Cafiero has been studying drug design involving new families of molecules that could help improve treatments for Parkinson’s disease. When he decided to expand his research and work with an international community of scientists this semester, he applied for a Rhodes grant that funded a Rhodes student’s participation in the research.

Driven by a love of being outdoors and on the water, environmental science major Bernadette Badamo contacted assistant biology professor Dr. Patrick Kelly last year about assisting him with his research on aquatic ecosystems. As a result, she has spent this summer in a canoe measuring sources of organic carbon in Mid-South area lakes to analyze how these lakes store and release carbon and how they cycle nutrients.

Students continue to win national awards after they have graduated from Rhodes. McKenna Davis ’18, a physics and mathematics alumna, won the Goldwater Scholarship in 2017 when she was a junior. Now as an aerospace engineering graduate student at UCLA, she has won the highly competitive fellowship.