About

Upstate Modern: Making Metropolitan America is a research and teaching project at Syracuse University led by Meredith Professor Jonathan Massey. Through courses and public programs, it aims to expand the scholarship on 20th century urban history by engaging students, faculty, and citizens in transdisciplinary research that draws on Upstate New York archives, buildings, landscapes, and communities.

Project participants completed the research summarized on this site during a spring 2013 course that focused on the theme of LIVING, encompassing housing, education, incarceration, and the other key dimensions of biopolitics such as the networks that supplied food, energy, air, and water to the region’s population. Future topics include WORKING–the changing forms and conditions of labor in this industrial region as it faced the maturity and decline of manufacturing along with the rise of information processing and the service sector–as well as PLAYING, arenas of leisure, recreation, consumption, community, and civic participation, from parks and museums to shopping malls, bars, and casinos.

Project advisors include:

• Joan Bryant, Associate Professor of African-American Studies, Syracuse University

• Andrew Cohen, Associate Professor of History, Syracuse University

• Kishi Animashaun Ducre, Assistant Professor of African-American Studies, Syracuse University

• Ansley Erickson, Assistant Professor of History and Education, Teacher’s College of Columbia University

• Catherine Fennell, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

• Jeffrey Gonda, Assistant Professor of History, Syracuse University

• Matthew Huber, Assistant Professor of Geography, Syracuse University

• Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography, Syracuse University

• Kendall Phillips, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and Associate Dean in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University

• Gretchen Purser, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Syracuse University

• Sean Quimby, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

By documenting the social, political, economic, and environmental history of our urban realm, this project aims to help students, scholars, and community members engage in and shape contemporary debates about the history and future of metropolitan America.