UC Davis historian Karen Halttunen will speak on history, memory and the Pilgrims of Plymouth, Mass. at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, May 25, as the final speaker in the 1998-99 Profiling the Social Sciences lecture series. The talk will be held in the campus's alumni and visitors center at the corner of Old Davis Road and Mrak Hall Circle Drive. The series, begun this year, has included such topics as economic change, child testimony in court and violence in long-term relationships. Halttunen, the author of the recently published "Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination," is also the author of "Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870." Halttunen's academic honors have included the Phi Beta Kappa Prize Teaching Fellowship at Yale, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a President's Fellowship in the Humanities. In the next academic year, she will be a Mellon Distinguished scholar in residence at the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts where she will research her next book on the history and memory of the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. For that project, Halttunen will use both fiction and nonfiction accounts of the events associated with the rock, including such items as tourist souvenirs and monuments. "I'll even hang out at Plymouth Rock to hear what people today say." The lecture series is sponsored by the Chancellor's Forum on the Future, Division of Social Sciences, Institute of Governmental Affairs and the Center for History, Society and Culture.