October 1, 2016 at 7:15 pm

Costa Lecture | How Arabs became Jews and Jews became Japanese: Immigration in Latin America, Oct. 20

The 39th Annual Endowed Costa Lecture features Dr. Jeffrey Lesser discussing “How Arabs became Jews and Jews became Japanese: Immigration and the Invention of National Identities in Latin America” on Thursday, Oct. 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Baker Center Ballroom A.

This event is sponsored by the History Department at Ohio University. A pre-lecture reception with refreshments begins at 7 p.m.

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser

Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Chair of History at Emory University. His interests surround the construction of national identity, focusing on how ethnic groups understand their own and national space. He has studied a range of people, including Asian-Brazilians, Arab-Brazilians, and Jewish-Brazilians.

Lesser’s newest book, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2013; Editora UNESP, 2015) examines the immigration to Brazil of millions of Europeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners beginning in the nineteenth century. It explores how these newcomers and their descendants adapted to their new country and how national identity changed as they became Brazilians along with their children and grandchildren. He argues that immigration cannot be divorced from broader patterns of Brazilian race relations, as most immigrants settled in the decades surrounding the final abolition of slavery in 1888 and their experiences were deeply conditioned by ideas of race and ethnicity formed long before their arrival.