Donna Gabaccia will deliver the annual Robert B. Walz lecture, 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 30, in the Foundation Hall of the Reynolds Center. Her presentation is titled, “If We Are What We Eat, Who are We?”
The lecture is free and open to the public. The audience is also welcomed to attend a reception for Dr. Gabaccia in the Salon B in the Reynolds Center following the lecture.
Dr. Gabaccia is professor of history and director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.
She is the author of numerous books and articles on immigrant life in the U.S. and Italian migration around the world, including From the Other Side: Women, Gender and Immigrant Life in the United States (Indiana University Press, 1994) and Italy’s Many Diasporas (Routledge, 2000). She has also written about food, culture, and migration in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Harvard University Press, 1998). Reviewers have praised her work for revealing how the immigrant experience shaped American culture.
The lecture is sponsored by the History, Political Science, and Geography Department at Southern Arkansas University and is part of the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecture Program.
Dr. Robert Walz taught history at SAU from 1958 to 1987 and was recognized as a leading scholar of Arkansas history. The Walz Lectureship was established in 1995 with a bequest from the estate of Mrs. Curtistine A. Walz, in honor of her husband’s long service to the university.
