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CORVALLIS - Oregon State University's annual Horning lecture and conference series will focus this year on how race and ethnicity helped shape the concepts of nationhood and national identity in the 20th century.

The series, "Race, Ethnicity and National Identity in the 20th Century," begins Thursday, Oct. 23 and runs through the end of the academic year.

Sponsored by the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities at OSU, the series annually brings to campus nationally recognized experts in a topic that often blends science and the humanities.

The evolution from competitive nation-states to globalization has complicated the role of national identity, the series organizers say. Science, law, politics and international relations have all played a role in the representations of race and ethnicity that westerners have used to define themselves.

Jeremy King, an Eastern European history from Mt. Holyoke College, will lead off the series on Oct. 23 with his lecture, "Ethnicity: The Strange Career of a Term." All of the lectures begin at 4 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206.

Other lectures in the series, which is coordinated by the OSU Department of History, include:

• Nov. 6 - "The Browning of America: Race, Religion and Ethnicity in an Erotic Age," by Richard Rodriguez, a noted essayist and writer of memoirs (4 p.m., MU 206);
• Jan. 15 - "The International History of Race and Nation, 1919 and 1945," by Glenda Sluga, University of Melbourne, Australia (4 p.m., MU 206);
• April 1 - "The Soviet Identity Regime: Categorizing and Being Categorized in the USSR, 1917- 1953," by Terry Martin, Harvard University (4 p.m., MU 206);
• April 15 - "Rethinking Ethnicity," by Rogers Brubaker, University of California at Los Angeles (4 p.m., MU 206);
• May 13 - "The Northern League and the Southern Way of Life: Nordic Nationalism in the Era of Massive Resistance in the United States," by John P. Jackson, University of Colorado at Boulder (4 p.m., MU 206).