Trine Mygind Korsby

Research fields: Transnational crime, human trafficking, criminal livelihoods, sex work facilitation, pimping, sex work.

Ethnographic fieldwork: Since 2007 I have carried out recurrent fieldwork in Romania, Italy, Portugal and Denmark among pimps, human traffickers, sex workers, and victims of human trafficking.

Thematically I work on anthropology of the body, perpetration, criminal livelihoods, desire, skills, morality, love and labor.

Other thematic fields: Experiments in collaboration in the university, collaborative concept-work.

In 2022 I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship Grant by the EU's Horizon Europe Program for my upcoming research project TRAFFICKER, about people convicted of human trafficking.

I recently finished the research project "Fortune Chasers: Transnational Hustling and the Everyday Livelihoods of Organised Theft and Scamming in Europe", funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (FKK). The project is an extension of my research on Romanian pimps, human traffickers and criminal networks engaged in different kinds of crime. The project explores the activities of credit-card fraud, theft, trick theft and scams, and how these activities are learned and performed.

I am currently part of the ERC-funded research project CRIMTANG, based at the Centre for Global Criminology, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, exploring transnational crime through the lens of anthropological criminology. My research focus is on human trafffickers and pimps and how they navigate in an established street economy and move between and interweave legal and illegal work arenas.

I have recently co-edited a special issue on transnational street business and migrants in the informal, urban economy (Migration & Society, 2023). I have been a visiting scholar at the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley in 2013, and I worked as a postdoc at Stanford University (CESTA) from 2016-2018.

In 2023-2024 I have been selected for UCPH Forward - a talent program at University of Copenhagen for excellence in research.