The 2011-12 fellowships have been awarded.

Read the press release (pdf).

Jump to... Apply | Current Fellows | Program History

Apply for a 2011-2012 Fellowship

The Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (http://gaming.unlv.edu) invites academic faculty and graduate students to apply for the 2010-11 cycle of research fellowships, which facilitate research into many aspects of both gambling and Las Vegas at UNLV Special Collections.  Although primarily in English, the holdings include many texts in French, German, and Italian spanning the 17th to 21st centuries as well as manuscript collections, casino corporate archives, promotional and publicity files, and government publications. 

The Center will award two kinds of fellowships.

Resident Fellowships offer a $3,500 stipend.  This award is intended for graduate students conducting dissertation research and junior faculty, particularly those turning dissertations into books.  Resident Fellows will complete a month-long residency at Special Collections at the University Libraries, deliver a public talk (which is recorded as part of the Center’s podcast series), and contribute a brief paper to the Center’s Occasional Paper Series.  It is expected that the research they conduct will be incorporated into their dissertation, a book, or another major research project.

Visiting Fellowships offer a $500 stipend.  This award is intended for senior faculty or junior faculty who do not have the time to commit to a month-long residency.  Visiting Fellows will spend a minimum of a week in residency doing research at Special Collections, deliver a public talk (which is recorded as part of the Center’s podcast series), and contribute a brief paper to our Occasional Paper Series.  It is expected that their research will be incorporated into an article, book chapter, or other research project.

Who’s eligible
Junior (recent post-doc and untenured) faculty and ABD graduate students are encouraged to apply for the Resident Fellowships.  Established and senior faculty are encouraged to apply for the Visiting Fellowships.  Applicants primarily represent the fields of history, economics, English, history, sociology, 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.
Before applying please learn as much as you can about the scope of the collections—priority will be given to applicants who specify collections they plan to use.  Visit the Center website for more information about the program, past fellows, and the collections.

How to apply
For the 2010-2011 academic year, please submit the following by July 11, 2011:

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

All materials must be sent electronically; the first three items should be sent in a single pdf file, with the letter of recommendation sent as an email (no attachments) by the recommender directly to the center’s director, Dr. David G. Schwartz, at dgs@unlv.nevada.edu. Please email the pdf of the application to the same address.  Paper submissions and those that do not follow these guidelines will be excluded from consideration. 

Successful applicants will be notified by August 1, 2011.

UNLV is an Affirmative Action / Equal Opportunity educator and employer committed to excellence through diversity.

You can view a printer-friendly pdf of the position description here.

2011-12 Fellows

Kah-Wee Lee
Resident August/September 2011
Lee is a doctoral candidate in the department of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation looks at the taming of vice in the context of postcolonial urbanism. Taking as his sites the recent casino developments in Singapore and Macau, he looks at how architectural design, urban planning and other environmental technologies help to draw the line between what is tolerated and what is not. His work at the Lied Library focuses on the historical evolution of gaming machines as part of this larger trajectory.

Lecture: "Taming Vice: How Machines and Architecture Changed the Culture of Gambling" Listen to the audio file (mp3)

Thomas Norman
Resident December 2011
Norman is a Fellow in economics at Magdalen College, Oxford.  His research is in game theory, and his project at UNLV is the game-theoretic study of poker.  In particular, his work extends a standard model of poker to the case where players can bet any amount from their stack, and analyzes how this modification alters game-theoretic predictions.

Jessalynn Strauss
Resident March 2012
Strauss is an assistant professor at Xavier University. Her teaching and research interests include public relations, corporate social responsibility, nonprofit organizations, and the history and culture of Las Vegas. She recently completed a dissertation examining corporate social responsibility in the Las Vegas casino industry. Her research in special collections will examine the history of public relations and promotions by Las Vegas casinos.

Lynn Gidluck
Resident March/April 2012
Gidluck is a doctoral candidate in the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work at UNLV will focus on how governments in North America and around the world have justified the expansion of gambling by developing partnerships with the voluntary sector and/or earmarking generated funds to programs seen to benefit the wider society such as education, sport, and culture. She is particularly interested in the public policy implications of government-operated or directed  gambling operations like state-run lotteries.

Christopher Wetzel
Resident April 2012
Wetzel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stonehill College.  His project looks at how issues of race, class, and gender have shaped debates over gaming legalization since the 1930s.  His research at UNLV will examine how casino proprietors, civic organizations, and elected officials in Nevada have framed subsequent efforts to establish pari-mutuel wagering and a state lottery.

History of the program

UNLV has been awarding gaming fellowships since 2007. Here are the past fellows.

2010-11 Fellows

Pauliina Raento
Resident November 2010
Raento is Professor in Human Geography at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Research Director for The Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research. Her research project at the UNLV takes an interdisciplinary look at the naming of Nevada's gambling establishments in the latter half of the twentieth century. The research in Nevada will support her qualitative data analysis with local, contemporary voices and visualization.

Lecture: The Naming of Gaming in Nevada see flyer | listen to audio (mp3)

RJ Rowley
Resident January, 2011
Rowley is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, who is expanding one of the themes explored in his dissertation on the meaning of neighborhood casinos to local residents. Rowley feels the development of the locals casino market is an important part of the gaming industry in Las Vegas and the United States. He hopes to contribute a geographic perspective to this largely historical project through the use of mapping and GIS analysis of the information discovered in research conducted in Special Collections.

Lecture: ""Neon Beyond the Neon: The Geography of Locals Casinos" Listen to the audio file (mp3)

Darryl Smith
Resident February, 2011
Smith is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at  Pomona College and  Affiliate of the Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies at the Claremont Colleges. He plans to research how tells in gambling  can be compared to sacred language as considered in a number of disciplines. The study for these signal genres of tell-signs and the strategies developed and deployed to expose them, holds promise for a practical reassessment of the notion of so-called “true names.”

Lecutre: "“'Dark with Excessive Bright'”: Gambling Tells and the Naming Taboo" Listen to the audio file (mp3)

Benjamin Min Han
Resident March, 2011
Han is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.  His dissertation, tentatively titled “Variety on the Small Screen: A Cultural History of Asian and Latino/a Performers on Television” is a multicultural project that examines ethnic performances on television and the instrumental role international talent played in the Cold War. His interest in Las Vegas developed while researching the Kim Sisters, a multi-talented South Korean female trio, who started their U.S. career performing in Las Vegas in 1959.  He believes his research will make an important contribution to the disciplines of American studies, history, and media studies.

Lecture: “We’re Right Next Door’: Televisual Las Vegas in Cold War America” Listen to the audio file (mp3)

2009-10 Fellows

Pascale Nedelec
Resident March 1-March 30, 2010
Ms. Nedelec is a Ph.D.Candidate in geography at the 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 fieldwork has led her to conclude that Las 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.

Lecture: Listen to the audio file (mp3)

Paper: Pascale Nedelec. “Urban Dynamics in the Las Vegas Valley: Neighborhood Casinos and Sprawl,” Occasional Paper Series 4. Las Vegas: Center for Gaming Research, University Libraries, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2010.

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.

Lecture: Listen to the audio file (mp3)

Paper: Theodor Gordon. “Nation, Corporation, or Family? Tribal Casino Employment and the Transformation of Tribes,” Occasional Paper Series 5. Las Vegas: Center
for Gaming Research, University Libraries, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2010.

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.

Lecture:Listen to the audio file (mp3)

Paper: Laura Cook Kenna. “The Promise of Gangster Glamour: Sinatra, Vegas, and Alluring, Ethnicized, Excess," Occasional Paper Series 6. Las Vegas: Center for Gaming Research, University Libraries, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2010.

2008-09 Fellows

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?

Lecture: Listner to the audio file (mp3)

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.

Lecture:Listen to the audio file (mp3)

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).

Lecture: Listen to the audio file (mp3)

2007-08 Fellows

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 | read occasional paper: "The Powerful Mythology Surrounding Bugsy Siegel" (pdf)

Dr. Matt Johnson, history

Dr. Jessica Cattelino, anthropology