Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she studies the interrelationships between media, technology, and society. Her specific areas of interest include digital and social media industries; gender, identity, and inequality; and the impact of new technologies on creative work and labor.
She's the author of two books on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. Wired named it one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017."
Duffy's first monograph, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examined the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of media production through an analysis of the magazine industry. She is also co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge, 2009).
Her research has been published in such journals as New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, and The Communication Review. In addition to her academic publications, Duffy has disseminated her research to a broader audience through popular writing in The Atlantic, Times Higher Education, Wired, and Quartz. Her commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, among others.
Duffy 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, among others.
Duffy 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.