France Winddance Twine was born in Chicago, Illinois and spent most of her early life on Chicago's Southside in a working class community. She attended Catholic schools and at age 16 entered Northwestern University where she earned her B.A. at the age of 20. She spent four years employed as a clinical specialist working in inpatient psychiatry before moving to Colorado, New York (West Village) and then New Orleans where she worked as a waitress, bookbinder and an artist and lived a bohemian lifestyle. She has taught at Duke University, University of Washington in Seattle and was a Visiting Distinguished Professor at The London School of Economics & Political Science. In 2008-09 she was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Twine, a leading scholar of social inequalities has published 70 books, articles, reviews and essays including 4 single authored books, 5 edited volumes and more than 40 journal articles, essays and reviews and has conducted field research in Brazil, Britain and the US. She is currently co-authoring a book on the tech industry.
