Please join other St. Louis–area Badgers in celebrating UW–Madison Founders’ Day, the annual event commemorating the UW’s first day of classes on February 5, 1849. You are sure to have an amazing night with great food and drinks while celebrating two local Badgers with awards. We also have the honor of hosting Sandra Adell MA’88, PhD’89, professor emerita of African American studies, to learn about her research and upcoming book!
The cost is $50 per person or $35 for recent graduates within five years of graduation.
Register by April 22.
About the Program
Enjoy a special presentation:
William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, and the Mississippi Riverboats
Drawing from her current book project, And Then the Casinos Came, Professor Emerita Sandra Adell will talk about representations of steamboats, slavery, gambling, and the Mississippi riverboats in William Wells Brown’s The Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave, as well as Samuel Clemens’s (a.k.a. Mark Twain’s) Life on the Mississippi. She traces the introduction of legalized casino gambling to 1991 when a riverboat was docked on the shores of the Mississippi at Bettendorf, Iowa, and how casino moguls betted on the legacy of Mark Twain to attract tourists to the then financially distressed town. She argues that the history of Mississippi maritime slavery has been erased, first by the “Disneyification” of 19th-century riverboats, and then by the scramble during the last decades of the 20th century to cash in on Mississippi riverboat gambling and the industry’s most profitable revenue generator: slot machines.
Speaker
Sandra Adell MA’88, PhD’89 is a professor emerita of literature and theater history in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In addition to books, articles, and reviews on African American literature and theater, she is the author of a 2010 memoir titled Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen. Her current project is And Then the Casinos Came: Black Women’s Narratives of Gambling, Addiction, Recovery. In this book, Adell weaves the narratives of five African American women who self-identify as problem or compulsive gamblers with her own story and her research on gambling, addiction, and recovery.
Awards
We are pleased to honor Badger of the Year recipient Nichole Bridges MA’02, PhD’09 and Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Drew Klein PhD’78.
Badger of the Year honorees are selected based on leadership in their professions, service in their communities, and/or contributions to volunteer organizations.
The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes dedicated chapter leaders who have served in a role (or multiple roles) with a chapter for 10 or more years.
Additional Information
When you register, please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions or require accessibility accommodations.
