Leominster Native Joseph Gale Earns Summer Research Award

EASTON, MA (04/09/2012)(readMedia)-- Leominster native Joseph Gale will be one of 50 students from Stonehill College working with faculty members at the College this summer on research projects through the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. The SURE Program provides students with an opportunity to perform significant, publishable research under the guidance of an experienced faculty researcher.

Gale, a junior history major at Stonehill, along with one other student, will work with James Wadsworth, associate professor of History on A Circle of Hands.

The research will focus on the hypothesis that the indigenous populations of the Americas constructed a functioning and viable hemispheric economic system that experienced alternating periods of intense contact and fragmentation with the rise and fall of political, cultural, and economic centers--for, there was nothing inherent in their geography, environment, worldview, or politics that rendered them incapable of constructing such a system. The research required for this project is ample. Therefore, Gale and the other student will focus on two smaller pieces of the study during this summer. They will examine obsidian trade routes in North America and investigate how the Puritans in Plymouth colony interacted with existing native exchange networks during the beginning of colonization. A paper detailing their research will be written and presented at the New England Historical Association bi-annual conference.

The scholars and their faculty mentors are the 17th group to work under the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. SURE Scholars will engage in weekly meetings to discuss the progress of their projects and other topics of general interest, and will be paid a stipend for their full-time service. All SURE Scholars will present summaries of their summer's work at an all-campus poster session in the early fall.

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