Dr. Charles McKinney, Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College, will be the featured speaker for ArtCafé Conversations at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art Sept. 25. He will discuss select pieces in the museum’s permanent collection by African American artists.

Retired Rhodes history professor Dr. Gail Murray will discuss her journey as a historian in academia on Sept. 21 at Novel bookstore. She is one of the writers whose personal account is featured in the new book No Straight Path: Becoming Women Historians.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Film Series, through partnership with Rhodes College and the Brooks Museum, is showcasing this fall work from the past 50 years by some of the world’s most significant Black independent filmmakers. Set in locations such as Senegal, Paris, New York, South Central Los Angeles, and the South Carolina coast, most of the films will be screened for the first time in Memphis. “Hyenas” (1992) by Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty is one of the films that will be shown at Rhodes.

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.