The Center is currently accepting applications for the 2009-10 academic year.

The deadline for submissions is July 24, 2009.

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.

View the job ad on H-net here.

Read the complete text of the original position announcement right here:

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:

1. A cover letter briefly introducing yourself
2. A full curriculum vitae
3. A short (2-4 page) description of the proposed research, with details on secondary research already done and sources to be used at UNLV
4. One letter of recommendation that evaluates your past research and current project
5. 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 are, in alphabetical order:

1.  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?

2. 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.

3. 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