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

Duffy studies the role of social media in work, culture, and society, with a focus on platform power and inequality. She leads the Creators & Platform Labor Research Group and contributes to both policy and industry conversations about creator labor.

Duffy’s forthcoming book, The Visibility Bind: Being Seen, Getting Paid, and Paying the Price of Social Media Success (The University of Chicago Press, in press), challenges the popular framing of the creator economy as an entrepreneurial Promised Land. By showing how creators and influencers navigate conditions of insecurity, overwork, and platform power, she urges us to reconsider the siren song of “putting yourself out there.”

Her earlier books include (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender and Aspirational Labor in the Social Media Economy, named one of Wired’s "Top Tech Books of 2017," and Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age. Her co-authored book, Platforms and Cultural Production, has been translated into multiple languages.

Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Social Media + Society, and Information, Communication, and Society. Her contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Young Scholar Award from the International Communication Association’s Popular Communication Division and a Bellagio Center Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

In addition to her academic research, Duffy’s public scholarship has appeared in The Atlantic, Vox, Salon, Business Insider, Wired, and Forbes, among other outlets. She also appeared in the Viacom documentary Fame in the Culture of Proximity.

Duffy has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Gender and Media, New Media & Society, Cultural Production in the Digital Age, Advertising & Society, and Qualitative Methods of Communication Research. She also developed a Ph.D. seminar on the creator economy, “Power, Platforms, 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 a B.A. from The Pennsylvania State University, where she was the student marshal for the College of Communications. Duffy serves on the advisory board for the American Influencer Council, the first U.S. trade organization created by and for professional creators.