Catherine Cardelús, Associate Professor, Biology and Environmental Studies, has been named the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies for one year, beginning July 1, 2019.

Catherine earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut. At Colgate, she teaches courses on Biodiversity, Evolution and Ecology, Tropical Ecology with Extended Study to Costa Rica, Ecosystem Ecology, and Conservation Biology and Practice. Catherine has a longstanding commitment to teaching about the Upstate region, regularly providing opportunities for her students to explore areas of Madison County to learn about where they live, how local ecosystems work, and, making use of regional resources, study their own impact on local ecology.

Catherine’s research has focused primarily on tropical forest canopies, asking essential questions:  What are the patterns of biodiversity, and how will biodiversity respond to a changing environment? She has conducted research in the rainforest of Costa Rica, where she studies the factors that control species richness and distribution. Most recently, she has researched and published widely on the vulnerabilities and conservation of the sacred church forests of Ethiopia.  She has received numerous grants and awards, including an NSF grant to study Mechanisms of Religious Management for Forest Persistence. Catherine has also focused significant research on the Upstate region, examining the effects of acid rain in the Adirondacks, climate change in our region, and, through quantifying the local deer population annually and working with local officials, she has evaluated ways to address deer overpopulation. Catherine’s commitment to having students study the complexities of our local ecosystem, understand the biological impacts and governmental policy in place, and work with them to provide data and ideas for the benefit of the local community support the mutually beneficial goals of the Upstate Institute.

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Burke Chair Kyle Bass (photo courtesy of Brenna Merritt)

The Upstate Institute welcomes award-winning playwright Kyle Bass to campus this year as the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ‘81 Endowed Chair for Regional Studies. Bass began his term as the Burke Chair with a public lecture on October 22 in Golden Auditorium that focused on the opening of his play Possessing Harriet at the Syracuse Stage.

Bass began his remarks to a packed Golden Auditorium by reading a powerful account of his personal journey with the project, which at times had the cadence of poetry. An audience of Colgate students, faculty and staff, and community members heard him speak from the head and the heart, as an intellectual engaged with histories and issues of identity, as a playwright who spent five years exploring and refining ways to convey Harriet’s narrative through language and dramaturgy, and as a black man deeply committed to his family roots, acknowledging the tensions of living in the present day while writing about a time so important to both past and present consciousness. In addition, Lucy Lavely and Nicole King , who portray Elizabeth Cady and Harriet Powell, performed a scene from the play.

In 1839, Harriet Powell, a young, mixed-race, enslaved woman slips away from a hotel in Syracuse, New York, and escapes from the Southerner who owns her. With the aid of a mysterious free black man named Thomas Leonard, Harriet finds temporary safe harbor in an attic room at the Peterboro home of impassioned abolitionist Gerrit Smith. With the slave catchers in pursuit, Harriet awaits her nighttime departure on the dangerous journey to Canada in the company of Smith’s young cousin Elizabeth Cady, an outspoken advocate for women’s equality. Confronted with new and difficult ideas about race, identity, and equality, and with confusion, fear, and desperation multiplying, Harriet is forced to the precipice of radical self-re-imagination and a reckoning with the heartrending cost of freedom. A world premiere by Kyle Bass, the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ‘81 Endowed Chair for Regional Studies and associate artistic director for Syracuse Stage, Possessing Harriet is directed by Tazewell Thompson and was commissioned by the Onondaga Historical Association.

On the following days, the Upstate Institute took over 250 students, faculty and community members to the October 23 and 24 performance of Possessing Harriet at they Syracuse Stage. 

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Burke Chair Kyle Bass (photo by Brenna Merritt)

Kyle Bass, Associate Artistic Director at Syracuse Stage and instructor in playwriting at Syracuse University, has been named Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair for Regional Studies for the 2018-2019 academic year. Bass is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (for fiction in 1998 and playwriting in 2010), a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, a semi-finalist for the O’Neill Playwriting Conference, and Pushcart Prize nominee. His new play Possessing Harriet, commissioned by the Onondaga Historical Association, will have its world premiere at Syracuse Stage in October, directed by Tazewell Thompson. Bass is the co-author of the original screenplay for the film Day of Days, which stars award-winning veteran actor Tom Skerritt (Alien, Top Gun, Steel Magnolias, A River Runs Through It) and was released by Broad Green Pictures in 2017. He is currently writing the screenplay adaptation of the novel Milk by Darcy Steinke and has been commissioned by the Society for New Music to write the libretto for an opera based on the life and music of legendry folk singer and guitarist Libba Cotten. Bass is the co-author (with Ping Chong) of Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo, which had its world premiere at Syracuse Stage and was subsequently produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York City. He worked with acclaimed visual artist Carrie Mae Weems on her theatre piece Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, which had its world premiere at the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, and was subsequently produced at Yale Rep and the Kennedy Center. Bass’s Separated, a piece of documentary theatre about the student military veterans at Syracuse University, was first presented at Syracuse Stage in 2017, directed by Robert Hupp. His prose and other writings have appeared in the journals Folio and Stone Canoe, among others, and in the anthology Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk about Writing and he has appeared as a guest on National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More,” discussing race in American theatre. and is Drama Editor for the journal Stone Canoe. Bass has taught in the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Goddard College since 2006. He also teaches theatre courses in Syracuse University’s Department of African American Studies, and in addition to teaching at Colgate University, Bass has taught playwriting at Hobart & William Smith College.

Bass holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Goddard College and is a proud member of the Dramatist Guild of America.

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Elizabeth Marlowe, Associate Professor of Art and Art History, has been named the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies, for one year, beginning July 1, 2017.

Elizabeth Marlowe holds a PhD in Art History from Columbia University. At Colgate she teaches courses on Roman Art and Medieval Art History and on Museum Studies. Her research and publications on classical art offer new readings of key monuments from late antique Rome. Early in her career Liz’s article “Framing the Sun: The Arch of Constantine and the Appropriation of the Roman Cityscape” earned her the College Art Association’s Arthur Kingsley Porter prize for the best article by an emerging scholar in the history of art and architecture, and since then she has published widely in a range of prestigious journals. Her recent work has focused on ancient art historiography’s largely uncritical reliance upon a small canon of archaeologically undocumented artworks. Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art(2013) calls for greater epistemological consciousness in the writing of Roman art history. The book advocates shifting the focus of the field away from long-famous artworks in museum collections (many of which have been heavily restored to live up to modern aesthetic ideals; others may even be forgeries) to more recently-discovered works whose archaeological contexts are better documented. At Colgate Liz was instrumental in creating the new Museum Studies minor, which she directs.  Her current teaching and research explore issues central to Museum Studies through a close examination of a range of important museums in New York’s Upstate region.

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Dr. Andrew Pattison, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, has been named the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies for the 2016-17 academic year. Pattison is coming to Colgate from California Lutheran University, and had degrees from Skidmore College and the University of Colorado Denver (UCD) School of Public Affairs.

Pattison was awarded a National Science Foundation IGERT grant to pursue a PhD at UCD’s School of Public Affairs through the interdisciplinary Sustainable Urban Infrastructure program. He completed a dissertation, “An Examination of Policy and Political Learning: A Study of Colorado Climate and Energy Policy Actors” and completed a Ph.D in Public Affairs in 2015. His research interests include: public policy, sustainability, climate change, policy process theories, the role of science and technical information in policy-making, and issues of urban social equity. His articles have appeared in Society & Natural Resources, Policy Studies Journal, Environmental Science & Policy, Journal of Industrial Ecology, and the Canadian Political Science Review.

At Colgate, Pattison will be teaching ENST 241: Sustainability and Climate Action, and a seminar in Environmental Studies (ENST 490).

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Randy Fuller, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, has been named the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies, for one year, beginning July 1, 2015.  Dr. Fuller has a PhD from the University of Toronto, and degrees from North Texas State University and Michigan State University. He teaches freshwater ecology, invertebrate zoology and environmental science at Colgate, and leads students out in the field in many of his courses to demonstrate how to quantify animal and plant communities.

As Burke Chair, Fuller is teaching an FSEM course on acid rain in the Adirondack Mountains and is giving four talks as part of the Environmental Studies Brown Bag series on campus. He organized a special session entitled: “Acid Deposition: 25 Years After The Clean Air Act Amendments” at the Society for Freshwater Science Meetings in Milwaukee, WI in May of 2015, and presented a paper entitled “Impacts of lime amendments on leaf decomposition and nutrient uptake dynamics in acid-stressed Adirondack Mountain streams” at the Acid Rain 2015 International Meetings held in Rochester, NY in October 2015.

This summer, two Colgate students worked with Fuller on leaf decomposition and nutrient uptake studies in Adirondack Mountain streams, and Fuller will be going to Sacramento, CA in May 2016 to attend the Society for Freshwater Science meetings and to present this research.

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The Upstate Institute will host an interactive event on the art and science of environmental storytelling in the wake of climate change. “Narrating Change” will be held on Wednesday, November 12, 2014 at 4:30 pm in the O’Connor Campus Center (The Coop) TV Room. The interactive, participatory event will explore the implications of climate change for all of us with the help of different types of storytellers—from the arts, theater, biology and ecology, anthropology. Panelists will help participants explore the stories and experiences of our community in a changing climate, and think through the power of these stories to motivate empathy and action in that community.

Read more

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The Upstate Institute at Colgate University welcomes Dr. Wyatt Galusky, Associate Professor of Humanities at Morrisville State College, to campus this fall as the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair for Regional Studies at Colgate University.

Dr. Galusky has a Ph. D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and degrees in philosophy from the University of North Texas and Texas A&M University. His teaching specialties include science technology and society, and environmental studies; and his research interests center on animals in agriculture and public engagement with science and technology. His publication list includes several articles and reviews, some of which have appeared in places such as Engineers, Scientists, and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement; Science as Culture; Science, Technology and Human Values; and Environmental Ethics.

Established in 2006 by Stephen Burke ’80 and Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81, the Endowed Chair for Regional Studies was created to support and recognize outstanding scholars whose research interests focus on upstate New York.

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The Upstate Institute at Colgate University will hold a panel discussion on “The Past, Present, and Future of the Dairy Industry in Central NY” on Friday, September 27 at 3:00 pm in Persson Auditorium at Colgate University. The event is free and open to the public.

Photo: ALAMY

Panelists include Kirk Kardashian ‘00, journalist and author of Milk Money: Cash, Cows and the Death of the American Dairy Farm (read more in the Colgate Scene); Douglas Harper, professor at the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts at Duquesne University and author of Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture; Sheila Marshman, professor of agricultural business at Morrisville State College and a recognized agricultural advocate; Bruce Rivington, owner of Red Gate Farm and Kriemhild Dairy Farms, LLC; and a representative from Chobani.

This event is organized by Christopher Henke, Associate Professor of Sociology and the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies. Henke is currently teaching an environmental studies and sociology course at Colgate called “Food” which looks at where food comes from, how it is produced, and how it is embedded in our economic, political, and cultural institutions.

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Chris Henke, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology

Christopher Henke, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, has been named the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair in Regional Studies, for one year, beginning July 1, 2013. Read more

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