Rate My Professor Gretchen Soderlund

Gretchen Soderlund is an Associate Professor of Media History and Director of the Media Studies Program in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. She earned her PhD in Communications Research from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she specialized in journalism history, and a BA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research specializations include the history of scandal in investigative reporting, media sensationalism, moral reform movements and the press, the rise of journalistic objectivity, the history of media coverage of sex trafficking, and conspiracy narratives in television and American political culture. Soderlund is the author of Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, Feminist Formations, The Communication Review, Humanity, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

She advanced to Associate Professor in 2014 and has served as Area Director of Media Studies since 2019 at the University of Oregon, following her initial Assistant Professor position there from 2013 to 2014. Previously, Soderlund was Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University from 2006 to 2012, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2005 to 2006, Assistant Director of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Communication and Society from 2004 to 2005, and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2004. She co-edited the special issue "Theorizing Sensationalism" for Feminist Media Histories 8:4 (Fall 2022, with Amanda Frisken) and "Charting, Tracking, Mapping: New Technologies, Labor, and Surveillance" for Social Semiotics 23:2 (2013). Key publications include “The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal” (American Quarterly 69:4, 2017, with Patrick Jones) and “Scandal and Sex Trafficking” in The Routledge Companion to Scandal (Routledge, 2019). In 2022, she received the University of Oregon Outstanding Department Head Award.