I grew up in the leafy green belt of London. During my teenage years there was a shift in the cultural political economy of the micro-region, as it morphed from the so-called "gin and Jag (Jaguar) belt" to the "vodka and Volvo belt." Never minding the semantics it was a fascinating, if extremely alienating, place to grow up. Summer holidays were spent in campsites in Brittany and the Basque country of Spain. The nationalism of the Bretons and the Basques was an early influence. School was pretty much uninspiring, although outstanding geography teachers at Dr. Challoner's High School made an impression. The confines and mannerly narrowness of school were compensated for (or circumvented – I am never certain) by an eccentric and polyglot family, whose uncles and aunts and great uncles and great aunts were clearly not people who fit any mold at all – let alone the ones they were expected to fit. Seeking a way out of disciplinary commitment, after high school I studied in the multi-disciplinary Social Science program at Leicester University. After a heady first year spent on Sociology, Politics, Economic History, Economics, and Human Geography, I opted for a Geography degree with a Politics minor. I thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual challenges the courses at Leicester threw at me. And, although my undergraduate thesis was a disaster, it taught me a lot about what is entailed in successful research.

I graduated in 1982, about the worst year for unemployment in Thatcher's Britain. I found a job (unlikely though it must seem) in Nisswa, Minnesota. I was a waitress in a northern Minnesota resort and then a nanny in a suburb of Minneapolis. During all this, I visited a friend (now Prof. Kim England at the University of Washington) who was in the graduate program in geography at Ohio State, and out of unnecessary generosity Prof. Kevin Cox permitted me to sit in on his seminar. I was enthralled and knew for sure that I had found my métier. I could not believe there were people who were (more or less) paid to read and think! I ended up at Syracuse University, in the Maxwell School, studying geography. Prof. John Agnew (now at UCLA) was a brilliant and kind advisor who steered me through a master's degree. After that, I returned to the UK and taught for a year at what was Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, and is now Anglia Polytechnic University. There, I found the most wonderful and diverse colleagues I have ever had the luck to work with. I think I learned more in that year about geography, the politics of higher education, and gender in the academy, than I had before or have since. The next year I returned to Syracuse where I began my Ph.D. Here with John Agnew still patiently guiding the way but with intellectually productive diversions provided, most notably by Stuart Corbridge (now at London School of Economics and University of Miami) and Mark Rupert, I began research on the geography of offshore finance. The graduate student community at Syracuse was particularly lively during these years (I suppose everyone says this of their cadre!) and the argumentative company of proto-luminaries such as Jonathan Smith, Nuala Johnson, Nalini Hennayake, Gearoid O'Tuathail, Paul Routlegde, and Scott Salmon kept me awake late many nights.

The dissertation was written largely in beautiful St. Albans, Vermont. I taught a course in Economics at St Michael's College in Winooski and one in geography at the University of Vermont. Each was a welcoming place. After only a year the move to Kentucky and escape from the snow belt came. I count myself as amazingly fortunate to have spent the years since as part of the Department of Geography, the Committee on Social Theory, and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. I have never taken for granted my genuinely collegial, intellectually alive, and critically engaged colleagues and students. It is a blast to be part of such a dynamic and productive group of scholars.

Outside of academe, I am fantastically lucky to live each day with the love and energy of my husband Rich Schein and of our kids Will and Betsy.