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MCC Daily Tribune

Honors Students Published in Illuminate

Please join me in congratulating two of our Honors students, Emili Gibson and Rebecca Soriano, who have been published in Illuminate, the undergraduate journal of the Northeast Regional Honors Conference. Please click on the titles below to read each essay:

Emili Gibson:

"The Art of Fashion as Sociopolitical Weaponry"

Rebecca Soriano:

"God the Mother and the Feminine Christ: Representations of the Madonna and Jesus as Divine Maternal Nurturers in Medieval and Renaissance Art"

Both Emili and Rebecca worked on these essays with faculty sponsor, Scott Rudd (English/Philosophy), last spring along with several other projects that they presented at Scholars’ Day, the Northeast Regional Honors Conference, and the Beacon Conference for Student-Scholars at Two-Year Colleges. Both essays were originally final projects in HMN 220 (Global Humanities).

Here are Emili’s and Rebecca’s bios that appear on the website:

Emili Gibson is currently a student at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY majoring in
English, and a member of both Phi Theta Kappa and the college’s Honors program. She plans on
transferring to a four-year university to continue her literature focus before moving on to
graduate school for a master’s degree in library science, with a concentration in archival and
historical research and preservation. She currently works at a local library and is deeply
passionate about the importance of libraries as literary hubs, cultural repositories, and inclusive
third places, particularly in low-income areas.

Rebecca Soriano recently transferred from Monroe Community College to Rochester Institute of Technology as a hybrid Studio Arts and Art History major. While attending MCC she developed a passion for academic research writing and presented her research on art history and literature at several conferences like the Community College Humanities Association in 2022 while also earning distinctions at the Beacon Conference and MCC’s Scholars’ Day in 2023. In between coursework Rebecca works full-time as an artist and actively exhibits her work in upstate New York. She is currently in her senior year of undergraduate studies and plans to pursue a master's in art history with a special interest in the Dutch Golden Age and Renaissance art.

Please join me in congratulating both of these students on this truly wonderful accomplishment.

Thomas Blake
MCC Honors Institute

Thomas Blake
MCC Honors Institute
11/02/2023