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.

Dr. Amy Risley, professor and chair of international studies at Rhodes, has a new book out titled The Youngest Citizens. Published by Routledge this summer, it traces the evolution of children’s rights in Latin America and analyzes a dramatic discursive and policy shift that has occurred since the 1990s.

Bill Cochran has announced that he will retire as Rhodes’ head men’s golf coach at the end of the 2019-20 season. This season will be Cochran’s 19th year as the Lynx head coach.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will deliver Rhodes College’s annual Constitution Day lecture on October 3. “We are honored to have Justice Breyer join us in Memphis,” Rhodes President Marjorie Hass says. “Our community will get a rare look behind the scenes of the Supreme Court. Lectures like this one are a key component of the transformational experience we provide for our students.”