Dr. Celeste Chamberland holds a copy of Cotton's The Compleat Gamester (1680) from the historical gaming collection in UNLV Special Collections. It is protected by a specially-designed clamshell box made by UNLV Libraries Conservator Michael Frazier.
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.
