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CORVALLIS - R. Marie Griffith, a lecturer in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, will speak Thursday, March 11, at Oregon State University.

Her talk, "Abstinence, Diet, and Bodily Perfection: Protestant Christianity and the Great American Diet Obsession in Historical Perspective," will begin at 4 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206. It is free and open to the public.

The lecture is the fourth in the 1998-99 Horning Lectures in the Humanities series, which has the theme, "Religion and the Body."

Griffith received a Ph.D. in religion at Harvard University in 1995, and spent the next three years on a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University. Now lecturing at Princeton, she has published a number of articles, including "God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission."

In her work, Griffith looks at gender and modern evangelism by examining the way that Christian body disciplines have been applied to diet and other forms of abstinence, said Robert Nye, the Horning Professor of Humanities at OSU.