The Center for Gaming Research in Special Collections has announced its 2014-15 class of Eadington Fellows. A description of each Fellow, with a summary of their intended research and the date and title of their talk, follows. They will be in residence in Special Collections beginning in January and continuing through June. Their talks are free and open to the public.
Catherine Borg
Borg (MFA Rutgers 2004, BA SFSU 1995) is a visual artist and educator in Baltimore, MD where she teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and Stevenson University. Her photo and video based art works have been included in exhibitions and screenings throughout the US, Europe and Canada, including at SF MOMA and Mass MOCA, and realized as public art projects for the Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission, the City of Las Vegas and Scottsdale Public Art. Awards include residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Jentel Foundation and an Artist Fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council.
Using a collection of images that were taken to evaluate the potential of locations to meet the needs of a 90s film script, she plans to continue her research of the evident traces and liminal space of American culture in transition through these displaced artifacts that present a more dimensional picture of Las Vegas as compared to mainstream media, albeit one that is still incomplete and imbued with the complexity of ownership and purpose.
Borg’s Colloquium lecture, "Scouted: An Inadvertent Archive from the Search for a Cinematic Vegas," is scheduled for January 15, 2015, at 3 PM.
Laurie Arnold
Arnold (Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2005) is an enrolled member of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes and is Director of Native American Studies at Gonzaga University. She has previously held positions at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago and at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2012. She holds a PhD in History from Arizona State University and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Oregon State University.
While at the UNLV Special Collections, Arnold will utilize the Katherine Spilde Papers on Tribal Gaming, for a new research project, A History of Indian Gaming: The First Forty Years. Within the Spilde papers she is particularly interested in testimonies, conference and meetings proceedings, and impact studies related to Indian gaming. Indian gaming both reinforces and limits tribal sovereignty. When considering tribal gaming, Native communities contemplate questions related to tribal identity and tribal cultural practices, and weigh potentially negative impacts on identity and culture against the possibility of economic success. She anticipates that items within the Spilde collection will illustrate some of these discussions and consequently enhance understanding of Native American community perspectives on tribal gaming.
Arnold's colloquium talk, "Indian Gaming, American Anxiety" is scheduled for March 18, 2015, at 3 PM.
Celeste Chamberland
Chamberland (Ph.D., University of California, Davis, 2004) is currently an Associate Professor of History at Roosevelt University. Specializing in early modern European social and cultural history and the history of medicine, her teaching interests include urban history, gender history, and the history of disease and public health. Her publications include articles in Sixteenth Century Journal, History of Education Quarterly, Social History of Medicine, and Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Currently, she is working on a book-length study that explores the relationship between gender, civic culture, and the professional identity of surgeons in early modern London.
In seeking to illuminate the ways in which inchoate models of addiction emerged alongside the unprecedented popularity of gambling in Stuart London, this project will explore the intersections between a rudimentary pathology of addiction and transformations in the epistemology of reason, the passions, and humoral psychology in the seventeenth century. By exploring the connections between endogenous and exogenous categories of mental illness, this study will examine the ways in which medicine, social expectations, and religion intersected in the seventeenth century alongside the historical relationship between evolving concepts of mental illness, stigma and the politics of blame and responsibility in the early modern period.
Chamberland’s colloquium talk, titled, “An Enchanting Witchcraft: Masculinity, Melancholy, and the Pathology of Gaming in Early Modern London,” is scheduled for May 14, 2015, at 3 PM.
John Hunt
Hunt (Ph. D., Ohio State University, 2009) specializes in the social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy, with a particular focus on popular culture in Papal Rome. He has written several articles on diverse topics that include the role of public opinion on the conclave and papal election; rumors and the pope’s death; and carriages and violence. He currently is revising his manuscript, “Violence and the Vacant See in Early Modern Rome,” for publication in late 2015. Future projects will focus on the culture of gambling in Papal Rome. He is an assistant professor at Utah Valley University.
According to Hunt, Romans gambled on everything—from papal elections and the promotion of cardinals to the outcome of tennis matches and card games. His project focuses on the “culture of gambling” in Renaissance Rome, starting by continuing work on an article about gambling on papal elections. From there, he will examine the role of gambling in the cultural life of Papal Rome. Despite the fulminations of preachers and the bulls of stern popes, Romans of all ranks gleefully played cards, diced, and wagered on papal elections. While in residency, he plans to examine several Italian-language treatises from the 1500s and 1600s.
Hunt’s colloquium talk, “Betting on the Triple Crown: Wagering on Papal Elections in Renaissance Rome,” is scheduled for April 15, 2015, at 3 PM.
Monica Steinberg
Steinberg is a Doctoral Candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her work focuses on the intersections of humor, identity, and contemporary art in the global context. She has contributed to exhibition catalogues including “The Abstract Impulse” (New York, 2007), “The Commonist” (Baku, 2012) and the Venice Biennale’s “Love Me, Love Me Not: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan” (Venice, 2013); and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Tufts University.
Within UNLV Special Collections, Steinberg will conduct research for an article-length project examining aspects of chance and risk that informed the artistic production of Los Angeles artists who frequented Las Vegas in the 1960s. Culling from the Publicity and Promotional material of various institutions including the Desert Inn, the Golden Nugget, the Stardust, and the Sands, as well as documentary photographs and the collection of How-To publications, Steinberg will reconstruct the visual culture that influenced the artworks of several California-based artists.
Steinberg’s colloquium talk, “Engagements with Chance and Risk: Los Angeles-based artists looking to Las Vegas in the Post-War Era,” is scheduled for June 30, 1015, at 3 PM.
