Brooke Duffy

rooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the Department of Communication and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her areas of interest include:

• Social media and society
• Media and cultural industries
• Digital labor
• Gender, identity, and inequality
• Algorithms and quantification
• Influencers and the creator economy

She's the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love (Yale University Press, 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. Wired named it one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017." In March 2022, the book will be released in paperback as (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender and Aspirational Labor in the Social Media Economy.

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. Duffy’s third book, Platforms and Cultural Production with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg, was published with Polity in late 2021. She is also co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge, 2009).

Duffy’s research has been published in such journals as Journal of Communication, 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, Vox, Times Higher Education, Wired, and Quartz. Her research or commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Vox, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The USA Today, and Vice, among others.

Duffy’s current projects include an analysis of the gender-coded critiques of fakery that dominate influencer “hateblogs” (with Kate Miltner and Amanda Wahlstedt); a study of content creators’ experiences of algorithmic precarity across TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube (with Annika Pinch, Shruti Sannon, and Megan Sawey); and an examination of the contract workers who supply a “human check” on search algorithms (with Colten Meisner and Malte Ziewitz). She is also leading a multi-year study that examines the fraught meaning of in/visibility in social media work (covered in Wired and The Verge). Relatedly, she is co-authoring a chapter on “The Feminization of Social Media Labor” with Sophie Bishop. From 2018-2021, Duffy is co-PI of a collaborative research project on “Algorithms, Big Data, and Inequality,” which is funded by the Cornell Center for Social Sciences.

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.

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.