Dr. Bobby J. Smith II | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, February 20, 2025 | 12:30 pm
TMH 101 & Online via Zoom
Registration Required
Food Power Politics reconfigures how we understand the American Civil Rights Movement, uses the movement in Mississippi as a litmus test to measure how Black people interface with the nation’s food system, and identifies blind spots that illuminate the persistence of food inequities.
This talk is organized by African American Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southwest.
Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an award-winning author, social scientist, and Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Fellow in the Policy Design Lab in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with affiliations in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition, and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science.
Trained as a sociologist, with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith’s research, teaching, and service creates a public interdisciplinary space to explore how Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to food and agriculture have shaped both their lives and the world. More broadly, Dr. Smith is an expert in food justice, food systems analysis, food equity, agricultural history, agricultural industry issues, and equitable policy design. While at the University of Illinois, Dr. Smith’s research has received international and national recognition. He was a named a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow, a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow, the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the USDA National Agricultural Library in 2023, a 2023-2024 Research Fellow in the Public Libraries Partnering on Food Justice Project with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a 2023-2024 Excellence in Research Award recipient in the Department of African American Studies, a 2024 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award recipient, and a 2024-2025 Helen Corley Petit Scholar from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, among other awards and honors.
Dr. Smith's first book, Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023), won the 2024 First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and the 2024 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Book Award-Honorable Mention from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The book was named a 2024 James Beard Book Award Finalist and a 2023 Hooks National Book Award Finalist. As the inaugural book of the Black Food Justice Series at UNC Press, Food Power Politics reconfigures how we understand the American Civil Rights Movement and uses the movement in Mississippi as a litmus test to measure how Black people interface with the nation’s food system and identify blind spots that illuminate the persistence of food inequities.
Dr. Smith’s other writings appear in respected academic journals including Food, Culture, & Society, Agriculture and Human Values, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. He serves on the editorial boards of Agricultural History, the leading international journal of record among agricultural historians and the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, the world's only peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal focused solely on food-and-farming-related community development.
Dr. Smith earned a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2018, a master’s degree in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University in 2013, and a bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) in Agriculture with a focus on Agricultural Economics from Prairie View A&M University in 2011. Deeply committed to public engagement, Dr. Smith was awarded the 2022-2023 Outstanding Service, Community Engagement, and Outreach Award in the Department of African American Studies.
