Dr. Vivian HalloranGalveston College will kick off the spring semester with the second offering in its Coastal Culinary Lecture Series: Exploring Food Narratives, “Recipe Discussions, Online Book Reviews and Virtual Hospitality,” on Thursday, Feb. 1, at 7 p.m. in room 207 of the Galveston College Fine Arts Building.

Guest speaker will be Dr. Vivian Halloran, professor of English and associate professor of American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

“We are excited to follow-up the lecture on Boudin Kolaches with this talk by Dr. Halloran,” said Dr. Shane Wallace, associate professor of English and coordinator of English and Humanities at Galveston College. “She is currently one of the significant voices in Food Studies and will share some of her own experience of moving to the U.S. from Puerto Rico.”

Dr. Halloran is the author of “The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity and Diaspora,” which examines food memoirs by immigrants and their descendants and reveals how their treatment of food deeply embeds concerns about immigrant identity in the United States.

Cover of “The Immigrant Kitchen” by Dr. Vivian Halloran

In her book, Dr. Halloran asserts that by offering a glimpse into the authors’ domestic lives through discussions of homemade food, these memoirs demystify the processes of immigration, assimilation, acculturation and expatriation—ultimately examining what it means to live as naturalized citizens of the United States.

Dr. Halloran served as associate director of American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and since 2005 has been a faculty fellow in the Program in Human Biology.  Other programs or centers with which she is affiliated at IU include the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Latino Studies, Cultural Studies, African Studies and the Anthropology of Food concentration.

Her research and teaching interests include the interconnections between art, history and literature; autobiography, poetry and the novel; and scientific discourse, medicine and popular literature.

The free lecture is open to the public and is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information about the lecture, contact Dr. Shane Wallace at (409) 944-7321 or [email protected].