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Research Projects
The Upstate
Institute supports faculty and student
research in various ways in the community.
We seek to encourage
faculty research
on, or directly pertaining
to, the upstate region of New York by
providing support for both the costs of
research as well as a stipend award for the
Colgate faculty investigator.
Students are supported by being
named an Upstate Research Fellow. In
addition, the Upstate Institute has funded
several projects
in past years
that benefit the region.
Colgate faculty
invited to submit research proposals
The Upstate Institute seeks
to encourage faculty scholarship on, or
directly pertaining to, the upstate region
of New York by providing support for both
the costs of research as well as a stipend
award for the Colgate faculty investigator.
Colgate faculty
may submit proposals for research on topics
related to the broad region of upstate New
York. Faculty members or groups of
faculty may also propose to organize a
scholarly symposium, conference, or workshop
that addresses issues concerning or related
to the upstate New York region.
Recent awards
are listed below.
The Request for
Proposals (RFP) for faculty research is
available here, and due to the Upstate
Institute by February 15, 2009.
Research Fellows
Program supports student research on Upstate New
York
The Upstate Institute is pleased
to announce the Upstate Institute Research
Fellowship Program. Students conducting
scholarship on the upstate New York region
during their senior year may be appointed as
Research Fellows of the Upstate Institute. To be
eligible, a student must be a senior, engaged in
honors level research within a department or
interdisciplinary program, and nominated by a
faculty member in the sponsoring department or
program. The project is expected to be
undertaken as part of an honors project and/or
independent study course during the senior
year. The student candidate will submit a
description of the scholarly project concerning
the upstate New York region to the director of
the Upstate Institute for review by the members
of the Executive Board. The proposal should also
include an estimate of the expenses associated
with the project. If the student is awarded a
Research Fellowship, the Upstate Institute will
seek to provide financial support for research
costs. The fellow will submit the completed
project to the sponsoring department or program
for evaluation. If the final project meets the
standards for honors within the academic
program, the results will be made available to
the community and archived on the Upstate
Institute website. The student may also be
invited to participate in a symposium on
regional scholarship organized by the Upstate
Institute during the spring semester. The
Upstate Institute seeks to award up to six
Research Fellowships for this current 2008-09
academic year. Student proposals should be
submitted to the director of the Upstate
Institute by the end of the fall semester. For
further information about the application
process, please contact Ellen Percy Kraly,
Director, Upstate Institute or Julie Dudrick,
Project Director, Upstate Institute.
Research Fellows Information
Upstate Research
Fellows Projects
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Sarah Halpern, '08:
Caring for their
Own: Jewish Community of Rochester 1920-1945 and
the Development of the New American Jewish
Identity
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Darcy Richardson, '06:
Child-Only
Welfare Cases in Madison County, NY
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Chris Brown, '05:
Oneida Nation
Economic Impact
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Alden Ellis, '06:
Summer
Sales Study for the Partnership for
Community Development
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Joseph Evans, '06:
The New
Deal in Madison County: Public Welfare
Assistance, Work Relief, and Economic
Regulations in Rural New York
-
Kevin McAvey, '05:
Chenango County Community
Needs Assessment
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Sabah Rabbi, '05:
Madison County Community Health
Assessment
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Darcy Richardson, '06:
Government Regulations
of Child Care
-
Jennifer Vivyan. '05:
WIC Final
Report
Recent Faculty
Teaching Awards
Charles Pete
Banner-Haley, Associate Professor
History/African American Studies
Advancing the Community: An
Overview of African American Networks in
Upstate New York, 1890-1990
This research project seeks
to provide an overview of the networks that
African Americans created in Upstate New
York. Through their social institutions such
as the family, churches, and various social
organizations, African Americans in the
Upstate region engaged in communal efforts
to advance and nurture pride in the race,
increase opportunities for educational
advancement and professional employment, and
enhance their status as American citizens.
Frank Frey, Assistant Professor of Biology
Tim McCay, Associate Professor
Biology
Natural History Museum of the Chenango
Valley – Phase I
Our aim is to redefine our biological
collections as the Natural History Museum of
the Chenango Valley. Currently, the
George R. Cooley herbarium contains
approximately 20,000 specimens
representative of the Northeastern United
States and Jamaica. Our vertebrate
zoological collection contains approximately
1,000 specimens and covers roughly 80% of
the local fauna. This project has
several long-term goals including (1) assess
our current holdings with respect to
representation of the Chenango Valley, (2)
lead a targeted effort to increase our
holdings where appropriate, and (3) generate
detailed distribution maps for particular
species of interest to the community.
Regarding outreach we hope to (4) develop
signage and other outward signs of our new
identity, (5) make the entire collection and
distribution maps web-accessible allowing
people that do not wish to or cannot visit
us to make use of the collection, and (6)
develop a program for Colgate students to
conduct K-12 school tours. In the
first phase of this project, we plan to
define the boundaries of our area of
concern, characterize the area with respect
to predominant habitat types, and produce a
series of maps that will ultimately be used
to overlay species distributions on habitat
types within our region. We also plan
to construct taxonomic lists for this region
drawing from published, broad-scale species
distribution works and then assess our
current collections with respect to these
lists. At the conclusion of this
research period we will have a well defined
and described study area, and better
understand how our current collections
reflect the biodiversity of this region. In
subsequent phases of this project, we will
focus on expanding our collection to fill
other gaps identified in this work.
Meika Loe, Assistant Professor, Department
of Sociology and Anthropology and Women's
Studies Program
How do community-based institutions and
individuals living in Albany and Hamilton,
NY, create support around aging? This
project analyzes diverse community-based
efforts to build social capital or support
networks around community, aging, and health
over the course of three years
(2006-9).Specifically, this three-year
longtitudinal research project tracks and
analyzes efforts around social capital and
elder support in Albany and Hamilton, NY, in
regards to elder housing, health, community
work, social life, and policy. I am most
interested in how community-based
institutions are adapting to serve their
aging populations as well as grassroots
efforts on the part of residents to ensure
their needs are met.
Loe's research was recently featured in a
piece on
National Public Radio about the Hamilton
Fortnightly Club.
William B. Meyer, Visiting Lecturer in
Geography
Syracuse Salt: The Life and Times of a
Natural Resource
The manufacture of salt from the brine
springs at the foot of Onondaga Lake formed
the early economic mainstay of the Syracuse
area. From the late eighteenth century
until well after the middle of the
nineteenth, Syracuse was the United States’
leading domestic salt-producing region.
Registering its peak yearly output in 1862,
it declined slowly but steadily thereafter,
though the brine itself remained plentiful,
until the last Syracuse-area saltworks
closed in 1926. The vanished industry
is a major part of the heritage of central
New York, and a comprehensive history of its
rise and fall would fill a gap in the
region’s literature. The industry also
affords an opportunity for a study of how
changes in society, from technological
innovations to economic and political
shifts, create (and destroy) “natural
resources” out of what the economist Erich
Zimmermann called “neutral physical stuff.”
William H. Peck, Department of Geology
Carbon Isotopes of Historical Maple Syrup
Collections: A Unique Record of Long-Term
Sugar Bush Health
Maple syrup production is an important
upstate economy, and its supplementary
income helps make family farms economically
viable. The maple syrup industry in the US
is currently threatened by a variety of
environmental and economic factors, some of
which especially affect Upstate producers.
I propose to examine a unique health record
of sugar bushes: the chemistry of maple
syrup archived by producers. The ratio of
the different masses of carbon incorporated
in sugars (13C vs 12C)
is sensitive to chemical reactions that
occur during photosynthesis, and thus can be
used to detect changing environmental
conditions such as atmospheric composition
or mean annual temperature. With the
help of the
Cornell and UVM Maple Syrup Extension
Services I will locate producers with old
syrup
samples
(apparently it is not uncommon to keep the
‘test samples’ from each year’s syrup).
This will be coupled with analysis of this
spring’s syrup production from different
ecological zones within the state.
I hope that this study provides useful data
on the decade-scale health of sugar maples
in New York and helps us understand the
possible cumulative effects of pollution,
disease, and climate change on the maple
syrup industry.
White Papers
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