Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Media Studies.

She is the author or co-author of three books, including (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." Her most recent book, Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg, has been translated into Italian and Chinese. 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 work in the creator economy. You can learn about what Duffy calls “the visibility bind” here.

Duffy’s work has been published 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.”

Duffy is the recipient of multiple research awards, including the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Outstanding Junior Scholar Award, the Young Scholar Award from the International Communication Association’s Popular Communication Division, the Emerging Scholar Award from the National Communication Association’s Division of Critical and Cultural Studies, and the CALS Award for Early Achievement in Research.

At Cornell, Duffy teaches 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 2024, she taught a new graduate seminar on “Platforms, Power, and Precarity in the Creator Economy.”

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.  Duffy serves on the board for the American Influencer Council and is a member of the Content Creator Scholar Network.