Barrie Thorne joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1995 with a joint appointment as Professor of Sociology and of Gender and Women's Studies. She previously held faculty appointments at Michigan State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Oslo. Her teaching and research focus on the sociology of gender, age relations, childhoods, and families; feminist theory, and ethnographic methods. For ten years Barrie Thorne served as the U.S. Editor of Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research; she is also a former Vice President of the American Sociological Association and a former Chair of the A.S.A. Sections on the Sociology of Gender, and the Sociology of Children and Youth. In 2002 she received the A.S.A. Jessie Bernard Award in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass the role of women in society. She has also received awards for teaching and mentoring. From 1998-2002 Barrie Thorne co-directed the Berkeley Center for Working Families, helping to build a feminist intellectual community researching "cultures of care" and the changing contours of family life in the context of global economic restructuring. In 2011 she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences, working with an international group of scholars who focus on personal development and socio-cultural change.

Barrie Thorne is the author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (Rutgers, 1993) and co-editor of Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement(Rutgers, 1997), Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions(Northeastern University Press, 1992); Language, Gender and Society(Newbury House, 1983), and Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance(Newbury House, 1975). Her recent ethnographic work,initially funded by the MacArthur Foundation Network on Middle Childhood, focuses on kids growing up in a mixed-income, ethnically diverse area of Oakland. She is on the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association and is active in the broader movement to challenge the privatization and defunding of public education.