Brooke Erin Duffy

Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is a social media researcher, author, and associate professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her areas of expertise include: media industries and cultural production; social media influencers and creators; gender, identity, and inequality; and platform labor.

Duffy’s books include (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender and Aspirational Labor in the Social Media Economy (Yale University Press, 2017/2022), which Wired named as one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017." She is also author of Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013); co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg; and co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts (Routledge, 2009) with Joseph Turow. Duffy’s current book project, “The Visibility Bind: Creators and the Perils of Platform Labor” (under contract, University of Chicago Press) draws upon interviews with social media influencers, creators, and streamers to explore the promises, perils, and paradoxes of the creator economy.

The author of more than thirty articles or book chapters, Duffy has published her research in such journals as Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Media + Society, and Information, Communication, and Society. In addition to her academic publications, she has disseminated her research to a broader audience through popular writing in The Atlantic, Vox, Salon, Business Insider, Wired, and Quartz, among others. Frequently sought out for her expertise on the influencer economy, Duffy has been quoted in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Vox, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The USA Today, and Vice. She’s also been an invited guest on such podcast and radio series as NPR’s “On Point,” Fast Company’s “Creative Control,” WBUR’s “Endless Thread,” and The Atlantic’s “Crazy/Genius.” In addition, Duffy appeared in the Viacom documentary series “The Culture of Proximity 2.0.”

At Cornell, Duffy is also a faculty affiliate of the programs in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Media Studies. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Gender and Media, New Media & Society, Cultural Production in the Digital Age, Media Theory, Advertising & Society, and Qualitative Methods of Communication Research. In spring 2024, she will be teaching a doctoral seminar on “Platforms, Power, and Precarity in the Creator Economy” as a special topics course within the Media, Technology, and Society area.

She completed her Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. She holds an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and B.A. from The Pennsylvania State University, where she was the student marshal for the College of Communications. 

Duffy and her family reside in Central New York.