Friday, March 29, 2019: Students, faculty, and guests gathered in the Regina Perguggi room for the History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies annual conference.
Now in its eleventh year, the Philosophy and Religious Studies Undergraduate Conference features scholarly work from students in the New York City-area who have completed philosophy or religion-based courses. Drs. Carrie-Ann Biondi and Bradley Herling serve as the co-organizers each year.
The 2019 conference began with a “Defining Religion” panel featuring Marymount Manhattan College students Allie McInerney, Molly Null, and Michaela Williams. The second session featured Daniel Driscoll, a Philosophy major at Columbia University, who presented his research, “On Nature, Economy, and Ethics in Thirteenth-Century Scholarship.”
The third session showcased the work of four Communication and Media Arts students enrolled in Dr. Brad Herling’s Introduction to Philosophy class this semester. The students, Macie Barefoot, Anna Dunn, Avara Hebert, and Princess Raymond discussed their individual essays that compared Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave to a contemporary television or film piece, including examples like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and films The Matrix and The Hunger Games.
Honorable mention: Jillian Silvia ’19, who was slated to discuss her essay, “Who Is the Strange Woman?” was unable to attend this year’s conference. In her absence, Dr. Bradley Herling led the fourth session of the day with his paper, “On the Proposition ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People’”.
The fifth and final session was led by MMC’s Philosophy Club with an interactive panel on hit television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Student leaders Agata Krapa, Alex Tavarez, Sabrina Sooknanan, and Molly Null participated.
Many thanks to our participants, attendees, and colleagues across the College for their support!
After graduating from MMC in 2016, Religious Studies minor Kiah Baxter knew that graduate studies would be part of her near future. Now three years later, she’ll soon earn her Masters of Divinity from the prestigious Union Theological Seminary with a concentration in Theology and the Arts.
