Thomas Volscho

Thomas Volscho came to CSI after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in 2009. His scholarship focuses on elite deviance, class inequality, and racism. In 2012 along with political scientist Nathan Kelly (now at Rutgers), he published an influential study in the American Sociological Review on the factors explaining the income share of the top one percent in the United States. As an analyst of racism, Professor Volscho published a study on racial disparities in the use of surgical sterilization between American Indian women, African American women, and European American women in the native studies journal Wicazo Sa Review and an additional related study on racial disparities in the use of the long-acting contraceptive depo-provera in Critical Sociology. In the last several years, Professor Volscho started working on a project about elite sex traffickers that unexpectedly culminated in working as an investigative journalist for a large news network on the cases of Jeffrey Epstein and Canadian fashion designer Peter Nygard. Professor Volscho is now working on a detailed book-length comparative case study of the elite sex trafficking enterprises of Epstein compared to Nygard that synthesizes the social psychological concept of “sexual grooming” with a model of organizational deviance.