Four professors in UNLV's College of Liberal Arts have been awarded prestigious fellowships designed to allow them to pursue their academic research.

Craig Walton, who heads UNLV's ethics and policy studies program, has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, while assistant history professor David Tanenhaus has been chosen for a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellowship has been awarded to Michele Tracy Berger, assistant professor of political science. Jieman Bao, an assistant professor of anthropology, is receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

"These awards are a direct reflection of the quality of the faculty at UNLV," said Jim Frey, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the college in which all four professors teach. "The competition for these fellowships is intense -- putting UNLV faculty up against their counterparts from the most prestigious institutions in the country.

"Each of the award recipients is doing the kind of work that brings national, and even international, attention. The award of a fellowship that permits them to pursue their research goals in a directed and focused fashion will bring even more notoriety to them and to UNLV. The university community is very proud of these recipients," Frey said.

Walton's Fulbright Fellowship will allow him to work at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany, during spring term 2001. He will be assigned to the university's Institute for Philosophy.

He will work with the American studies faculty, teaching American philosophy, and will help them build their library collection in that area. He also will work with the economics faculty to develop their business and professional ethics class and with the medical faculty to develop their bioethics class. Both classes will be taught in German.

Walton has been a professor at UNLV since 1972. He worked entirely in the philosophy department until 1987 and since then has worked increasingly in ethics and policy studies, which offers an interdisciplinary master of arts degree.

Tanenhaus, who has been a member of the UNLV faculty since 1997, will use his Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship as a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. There he will complete the process of turning his dissertation into a book to be titled The Invention of Juvenile Justice. His 11-month fellowship will begin Aug. 1.

At the Newberry Library, Tanenhaus will work with manuscript collections, census data, and genealogical records covering the years 1870 to 1925. While doing his research he already has discovered more than 2,700 previously unexamined case files from early 20th century Chicago. In his book, Tanenhaus plans to place the contemporary crisis over child welfare and youth violence into historical context and challenge what he describes as the common assumption that the history of juvenile justice has been a story of decline.

Berger was one of 12 people chosen from among more than 400 applicants this year to participate in the Scholars in Health Policy Research Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The program brings together scholars from political science, economics, and sociology to develop disciplinary research that will help inform future health policy discussions.

Berger's two years in the program will be spent at the University of California, Berkeley. She has proposed a pilot project that centers on an examination of three states that have varying levels of sophistication and development of HIV-related services, organizations, service providers, and service technology. The project investigates the relationships between the conceptions that policymakers have and the conceptions that service providers have of vulnerable populations with HIV/AIDS. Berger has been on the UNLV faculty since January 1999.

Bao, who won a Rockefeller Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, will spend the 2000-01 academic year in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights at Columbia University.

During her year in New York, she will complete final revisions on a book tentatively titled Marital Acts: An Ethnography of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity of Diasporic Chinese in Bangkok. Among the topics the book will address are how ethnic identities are informed by regulations of femininity and masculinity and how sexuality, as much as class, is central to understanding the formation of cultural membership.

Additionally, Bao, who has been at UNLV for three years, will work with other post-doctoral fellows in organizing and conducting weekly seminars, coordinating a lecture series, and putting on conferences.

For additional information on these professors and their fellowships, call UNLV's College of Liberal Arts at 895-3401.