Professor Crosset to Deliver Talk on Racism in Sport to U.N. Committee in Geneva

Todd W. Crosset, associate professor in the McCormack Department of Sport Management, is giving a talk on racism in American sports to a United Nations panel on July 20 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) is an inter-governmental committee, mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council. It is designed to “elaborate, as a matter of priority and necessity, complementary standards in the form of either a convention or additional protocol(s) to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” according to the United Nations.

At the July 20 session, the committee will consider the agenda item “Racism in Sport” and invited Crosset to speak because he has “carried out extensive academic work at the University of Massachusetts considering issues of structural racism in American sport.”

Trained as a sociologist, Crosset has been writing, teaching and researching the topics of race and gender in American sport for 25 years. He has written an award-winning book on the Ladies Professional Golf tour, Outsiders in the Clubhouse: The World of Professional Women's Golf, published in 1995 by SUNY Press. His articles on race and sport have been published in Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics, International Journal of the History of Sport andInternational Review for the Sociology of Sport.

Crosset is director of undergraduate programs in sport management. He joined the university in 1992. Crosset earned a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1982. He earned an M.A. and master’s degree and doctorate in sociology from Brandeis University in 1985 and 1992, respectively. He received the Distinguished Outreach Teaching Award in 2009.

Prior to arriving at UMass Amherst, Crosset held positions as head coach of swimming at Northeastern University and assistant athletic director at Dartmouth College. He was an All-American swimmer at the University of Texas, Austin.