Bouchet Society Lecture

The Possibility Within: On Perseverance, Purpose, and Becoming

Speaker: Chelsea D. McNutt, Ph.D. ’26, Assistant Professor of History at Grambling State University

Date: November 10, 2026
Time: 12:00-1:30 pm ET
Primary Location: virtual

Session Summary:

Drawing on her personal journey through academia, Dr. Chelsea D. McNutt reflects on how relationships and life’s unpredictability shape our understanding of what is possible. Grounded in the five pillars of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, this lecture invites the audience to recognize the possibilities within their own lives and consider what it means to forge a path beyond the one they originally imagined.

headshot of Dr. Chelsea D. McNutt

About our Speaker:

Dr. Chelsea D. McNutt is an Assistant Professor of History at Grambling State University and an alumna of Cornell University’s Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. Working at the intersections of twentieth-century African American and cultural history, her research centers Black women’s political activism and expands conventional understandings of political labor in the Jim Crow South. Her first book project builds upon her doctoral research on Black women’s activism within the NAACP across Arkansas and the broader South. Her scholarship illuminates how Black women’s everyday practices of care created the conditions for collective political action. Through her work, Dr. McNutt positions Black women as producers of political knowledge whose ideas shaped how the struggle for civil rights was imagined and carried forward. Dr. McNutt’s research has been supported by the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Research Fellowship from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South Research Fellowship at the University of Alabama, and numerous fellowships and research awards from Cornell University. She has presented her scholarship nationally and internationally through institutions and scholarly organizations including the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Society for the History of Women in the Americas, and the Southern Association for Women Historians, as well as at universities and research institutions across the United States and Europe.

Dr. McNutt earned her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University in 2026, where she was a Graduate School Dean’s Scholar. She also earned an M.A. in History from Cornell. Dr. McNutt began her academic training at Arkansas State University–Jonesboro, where she earned a B.A. in History with a minor in African American Studies and later an M.A. in History, receiving the Dr. John A. Galloway Award in 2018.

About the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society:

Yale University and Howard University established the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in 2005. Named for the first African American doctoral recipient in the United States (Ph.D. from Yale University in 1876), the Bouchet Society recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and promotes excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate. Outside of the society’s founding universities, Yale and Howard, Cornell was among the earliest universities to establish a chapter of the Bouchet Society with its first members inducted in 2006.

The Bouchet Society seeks to develop a network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic and personal excellence, foster environments of support and serve as examples of character, leadership, advocacy, scholarship, and service. In the spirit of Bouchet’s commitment to these pursuits both within and beyond the academic realm, inductees into the honor society exhibit these qualities through their leadership, research, and service.

Initiated in 2024, the Annual Bouchet Society Lecture at Cornell University provides an opportunity to highlight Bouchet alumni who are making meaningful contributions to academia and society more broadly through their scholarship, leadership and service.

EVENT SPONSORS: Graduate School Office of Inclusion & Student Engagement, Future Faculty and Academic Careers Program, and the Cornell Chapter of the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society

Previous Bouchet Society Lectures

Building Access, Strengthening Evidence, and Advancing Impact for Research and Practice

Speaker: Ozias A. Moore, Ph.D. ’16, Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at Lehigh University

Session Summary:
What shapes access to the relationships, resources, fair evaluation, and learning opportunities that individuals need to succeed in organizations — and what stands in the way? In this Bouchet lecture, Dr. Ozias A. Moore addresses these questions through findings from his multi-method research program, organized around four central themes: access to supportive relationships and resources, access to fair evaluation, access to learning, and access to trustworthy knowledge. Drawing from diverse theoretical perspectives and research designs, including field studies, experiments, and archival and longitudinal research, he examines how people rebuild professional networks and performance after organizational disruption, how bias enters hiring and career decisions, how team structure shapes the way people learn from one another, and how AI literacy influences trust when collaborating with generative AI. He also addresses why transparency in how we conduct research matters for building trustworthy knowledge. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the conditions shaping access to relationships, evaluation, and learning are interconnected, with implications for both organizational practice and how we advance research. The lecture will foster insights and meaningful discussion to guide future directions, in ways that reflect the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society’s qualities of scholarship, leadership, character, service, and advocacy.

headshot of Dr. Ozias A. Moore

About our Speaker:
As a Cornell Bouchet Society alum, Dr. Ozias A. Moore is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at Lehigh University. He has also held a Visiting Assistant Professor of Management position at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research spans individual and team levels of analysis, with an overarching focus on how individuals effectively work across boundaries in dynamic organizational settings. He examines how dynamic team composition, in particular multiple team membership (MTM), and the microdynamics of social networks shape within- and between-team interactions and team effectiveness, and how personal characteristics and contextual factors influence evaluation, decision-making, diversity, and learning for employees and leaders. His research has been published in journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, Group & Organization Management, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, and Personnel Psychology. He serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Organizational Behavior and the Journal of Management Studies.

Dr. Moore’s research findings have been featured in popular media outlets. He has received national and university-wide recognition for excellence in teaching, including being named among the Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors by Poets & Quants and receiving the Lehigh University College of Business Teaching Excellence Award. While at Cornell, he was a Graduate School Dean’s Scholar and received the Toni Morrison Award for Graduate Mentorship. Before completing his Ph.D., he held management and executive-level positions at Westinghouse Electric Corporation, IBM Corporation, American Express, and Pfizer, Inc. He is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) through the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Dr. Moore earned a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.S. in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Human Resource Studies from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Emancipatory Vision of L. C. Dorsey: Black Food Futures and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Speaker: Bobby J. Smith II, Ph.D. ’18, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Session Summary:
This lecture challenges us to reconsider how we think and talk about food. Drawing on research from his award-winning book, Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023), Dr. Bobby J. Smith II narrates how food emerged as a contested site of Black freedom during the American Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. He focuses on the emancipatory vision of Mrs. L. C. Dorsey, a woefully forgotten civil rights activist, and her role as the leader of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative, an innovate local Black food network of activists, community members, healthcare professionals, and farmers. While the development of the cooperative is overlooked in stories about the struggle for civil rights, Smith shows how Dorsey and the cooperative network used the civil rights movement as incubator for the creation of innovative food systems. Looking forward, such food systems provide blueprints for Black food futures—where Black communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, create and sustain a self-sufficient local food system designed by them.

About our Speaker:
Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an interdisciplinary scholar of the African American agricultural and food experience. Trained as a sociologist, with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Fellow in Policy Design Lab in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition, and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science.

His research program and teaching agenda cultivates an intellectual sphere and public space to interpret how Black people build agricultural and food systems amid inequalities that orbit the Black world. Dr. Smith is the author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, 2023). Thinking with multiple disciplines including African American Studies, critical food studies, and agricultural science, Food Power Politics brings into focus how food was used as a weapon against African Americans during the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and how they fought back, creating their own food programs and systems. Interfacing archival data, in-depth interviews, and oral histories, Food Power Politics illuminates how the food dynamics of the Mississippi civil rights movement provide a pathway for understanding how Black youth today—in Mississippi and beyond—are building food justice movements, grappling with inequalities that attempt to shape their lives.