Gretchen Soderlund is Associate Professor of Media History and Area Director of Media Studies. Her book, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), demonstrates that media controversies around trafficking were one of the premier battlegrounds on which struggles over journalistic knowledge took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2013, she edited "Charting, Tracking, and Mapping: New Technologies, Labor, and Surveillance," a special issue of Social Semiotics that examined how emerging technologies shape social relations and practices in workplace environments. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Feminist Formations, American Quarterly, The Communication Review, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy Studies. 

• PhD, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• BA, English, Virginia Commonwealth University

(Selected)

"Scandal and Sex Trafficking." in The Routledge Companion to Scandal. Routledge, 2019. 361-370.

"Futures of Journalisms Past (or Pasts of Journalism's Future)." Boundary 2.0 (August 2018).

“The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal.” American Quarterly 69:4 (December 2017). 833-856. (Patrick Jones, co-author).

"The Progressive Movement." In The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication. Heboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 

Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

"Charting, Tracking, and Mapping: New Technologies, Labor, and Surveillance." Guest Editor, special issue of Social Semiotics. 23:2 (May 2013).

“Approaches to Gender and Sexuality in Media History.” In Media History and the Foundations of Media Studies, John Nerone (Ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

"The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé." Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. 2.2 (Summer 2011): 193-211.

"Journalist or Panderer? Framing Underage Webcam Sites." Sexuality Research and Social Policy Studies 5:4 (2008). 62-72.

"Communications Scholarship as Ritual: James Carey's Cultural Model of Communication." In Thinking With James Carey: Essays on Communication, Transportation, History. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. 100-117. 

"Rethinking a Curricular Icon: The Institutional and Ideological Foundations of Walter Lippmann. The Communication Review 8:3 (July/September 2005). 307-327.

“Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Global Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition.” Feminist Formations 17:3 (Fall 2005). 64-87.

"Threat or Opportunity: Sexuality, Gender, and the Ebb and Flow of Traffic as Discourse." Canadian Woman Studies/ les cahiers de la femme. 22:3/4 (Spring/Summer 2003). 6-26. (Penelope Saunders, co-author).

"Covering Urban Vice: 'White Slavery,' The New York Times, and the Construction of Journalistic Knowledge." Critical Studies in Media Communication 19:4 (December 2002). 438-460.

J201: Media and Society

J320: Gender, Media, and Diversity

J387: Media History

J412: History of Investigative Journalism

J413: Media Studies Capstone Seminar

J610: Histories of the Press and Sensationalism

J643: Advanced Doctoral Seminar

J660: HIstorical Methods