Toussaint Losier
Associate Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, UNITED STATES
Toussaint Losier's research focuses on grassroots responses to the postwar emergence of mass incarceration in Chicago and other areas
Expertise (4)
Mass Incarceration
Grassroots Responses to Mass Incarceration
Criminal Justice Policy
Incarceration and Racial Disparity
Biography
Toussaint Losier's research focuses on grassroots responses to the postwar emergence of mass incarceration in Chicago. He teaches courses on African American History, Black Politics, Criminal Justice policy, and transnational social movements.
Losier's writing has been published in Souls, Radical History Review, The Journal of Urban History, Against the Current, and Left Turn Magazine. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement with Dan Berger and preparing a book manuscript titled, War for the City: Black Chicago and the Rise of the Carceral State.
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Education (3)
University of Chicago: Ph.D., History
University of Chicago: M.A., History
Harvard University: B.A., Departments of Social Studies and African and Afro-American Studies
Links (1)
Select Recent Media Coverage (3)
Reopening city’s mental health clinics will be an important early test for Mayor Brandon Johnson
Black News online
2023-06-07
Toussaint Losier was a volunteer with the Mental Health Movement, which worked with patients to spearhead protests against the closures. Now a professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Losier said he’s struck by how the fight to reopen the clinics has remained potent for over a decade.
Storming the Gates: Fifty Years After the Attica Prison Uprising
WNYC radio
2021-09-14
Toussaint Losier is quoted in a radio report about the 50th anniversary of an uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility and the contributions the Nation of Islam, also known as Black Muslims, made to the movement for prison reform.
Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier On The American Prisoner Movement
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Podcast online
2020-09-09
Historians Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier who co-authored the book Rethinking The American Prison Movement are interviewed on the 49th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion,
Select Publications (2)
Working behind bars
StiftungToussaint Losier
2001-12-02
"Unfree labour is still alive and well in the United States, a century and a half after the civil war that supposedly put an end to it. Ironically, it still considered legal because of the very constitutional amendment that abolished slavery in 1865."
Rethinking the American Prison Movement (Book)
RutledgeDan Berger and Toussaint Losier
2017-10-26
Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of the transformational and ongoing struggles against America’s prison system. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier show that prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality.
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