The 2009-10 application cycle has closed; more information on the 2010-11 cycle will be released in January 2010.
The Gaming Research Fellowship program provides successful applicants with a $4000 stipend and workspace in Special Collections. Graduate students and academic faculty are eligible to apply.
2009-10 Fellowship recepients
Pascale Nedelec
Resident March 1-March 30, 2010
Ms. Nedelec is a Ph.D.Candidate in geography at teh University of Lyon 2 in Lyon, France, who is working on the ideas of Las Vegas and duality. She hopes to understand its concrete materializations for the local population, for the tourists and for the city itself. Moreover, she is developing the notion of transient city that she deems especially pertinent for Las Vegas. Her preliminary fieldword has led her to conclude, Vegas distinguishes itself by the importance of an ephemeral population that leaves the city after an average period of 5 to 10 years. This situation may be linked to a status of frontier-town and to a pioneer mentality characterizing part of the inhabitants. Hence, she argues the existence of a specific sense of place in Las Vegas, affecting the very urban nature and the various processes of local appropriation.
Theodor Gordon
Resident April 1-April 30, 2010
Mr. Gordon is a Ph.D. Candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Riverside who is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork with a focus on the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and its neighboring communities, Highland and San Bernardino, California. His dissertation research analyzes the relationship between the local ecnomic impacts of tribal gaming and changing cultural constructions of American Indian identity..
Laura Cook Kenna, Ph.D.
Resident May 1-May 30, 2010
Dr. Cook Kenna is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University whose area of research is a 20th century cultural history with emphases on post-WWII race and ethnicity and the history of mass culture. Her investigation into the ways that Las Vegas entertainment and entertainers were understood is part of a more ranging historical analysis of how Americans responses to gangster-tinged culture have depended upon and also reshaped their views of media and of difference. In her research, she examines widely popular gangster-inflected entertainment, including television series, films, rap
music, and video games, as well as the mob-related rumors that colored Sinatra and Vegas reputations. Her approach pushes beyond traditional genre or stereotype studies of the gangster by focusing on the history of public adulation as well as public controversy that followed gangster media.
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The Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (http://gaming.unlv.edu) invites graduate students and academic faculty to apply for month-long residency fellowships.
Fellows will spend one month doing research at UNLV Special Collections, which includes an unrivalled collection that spans the 17th to 21st centuries. Although primarily in English, the holdings include many texts in French, German, and Italian.
This, the largest gambling library in the world, includes manuscript collections, casino corporate archives, promotional and publicity files, and government publications. For more information on the collections see http://library.nevada.edu/speccol/gaming/index.html.
What you get
- A $4,000 stipend to cover housing and expenses
- Full access to all collections
- Desk space in the UNLV Special Collections Reading Room
What you give
- One month’s residency in Las Vegas
- A public lecture relating to your research near the end of your residency
- Ultimately, a publication (article, chapter, or book) that showcases your research
Who’s eligible
Both faculty and graduate students are encouraged to apply. Applicants are expected to primarily represent the fields of history, English, sociology, criminal justice, and anthropology, though those from all disciplines with relevant research interests are encouraged to apply. Suggested fields of research include Las Vegas history, the history of gambling, and comparative studies of gambling in literature, history, and society.
How you apply
For the 2009-2010 academic year, please submit the following by July 24, 2009:
- A cover letter briefly introducing yourself
- A full curriculum vitae
- A short (2-4 page) description of the proposed research, with details on secondary research already done and sources to be used at UNLV
- One letter of recommendation that evaluates your past research and current project
- For graduate student applicants, a dissertation prospectus or article-length writing sample
Please send all materials (and any questions about the program) to the center’s director, Dr. David G. Schwartz, electronically. DO NOT SEND PAPER APPLICATIONS.
UNLV is an Affirmative Action / Equal Opportunity educator and employer committed to excellence through diversity. |
The 2008-09 Graduate Research Fellows were, in alphabetical order:
Jacob Avery Sociology, University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D Candidate)
Resident February 15-March 15, 2009
Jacob is a fourth-year PhD student in sociology whose current research interests lie at the intersection of a number of substantive areas within sociology, including: urban studies, deviance, culture, games and gambling, work and identity, and qualitative methods. His dissertation, an ethnography, is looking at how ‘regulars’ in Atlantic City’s casino card rooms think about and understand their involvement with poker and, in turn, how they construct an identity around their involvement with poker. The primary question animating this research is: how does the game of poker organize the everyday lives of card room regulars?
Nicholas Tosney, Ph.D. History, University of York (UK)
Resident April 25-May 25. 2009
Nicholas has conducted extensive research into gambling, culminating in his doctoral dissertation, which is a wide-ranging social history of gaming structured around five main subjects: the regulation of the playing card trade and the taxation of gaming; crime and the ‘policing’ of gaming; gaming environments; attitudes to gaming; and cheating. But because gaming was so rife in early modern England, his study also reveals much about processes of commercialisation and economic development, attitudes to risk, different types of sociability, and crime and the policing of popular recreations. To better adapt his dissertation for commercial publication, he is broadening it to include an examination of the development of Las Vegas.
Cristina Turdean History, University of Delaware (Ph.D Candidate)
Resident November 3-December 3, 2008
Cristina is part of the Hagley Program at Delaware, and concentrates on the history of technology, work, business consumption, and industrialization. Her dissertation, which is called Betting on Computers: Digital Technologies and the Rise of the Casino Industry in the United States, examines how American casinos adopted and used digital technologies (computers in particular) and, in the process, gained social and economic prominence in the post-1960 era. While this topic contributes to the existing literature on the history of gambling, it also addresses aspects that have been even less explored by historians of gambling (i.e. technology, business practices, labor and skills).
The Gaming Fellowship Program began in 2007 with funding from UNLV University Libraries. In the first awards cycle, five applicants were chosen for month-long residencies. They were:
Dr. Stewart Ethier, mathematics
Jane Haigh, history
Dr. Larry Gragg, history
Dr. Matt Johnson, history
Dr. Jessica Cattelino, anthropology |
