Susan J. Douglas

Susan J. Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Communication Studies, and former department chair, at The University of Michigan. Her new book, In Our Prime: How Older Women are Reinventing the Road Ahead is forthcoming in March 2020 from Norton. She is author of Celebrity: A History of Fame (NYU Press, with Andrea McDonnell), The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010); The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermines Women (with Meredith Michaels, The Free Press, 2004); Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Times Books, 1999), which won the Hacker Prize in 2000 for the best popular book about technology and culture, Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (Times Books, 1994; Penguin, 1995) and Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins, 1987). She has lectured at colleges and universities around the country, and has written for The Nation, In These Times, The Village Voice, Ms., The Washington Post and TV Guide, and was media critic for The Progressive from 1992-1998. Her column “Back Talk” was featured for over twenty years in In These Times. She has appeared on The Today Show, The CBS Early Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Working Woman, CNBC's Equal Time, NPR's Fresh Air, Weekend Edition, The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Michael Feldman’s Whad’ya Know and various radio talk shows around the country. Where the Girls Are was widely praised, and chosen one of the top ten books of 1994 by National Public Radio, Entertainment Weekly and The McLaughlin Group. She served on the Board of the George Foster Peabody awards from 2005-2010, and in 2010 was selected as Chair of the Board. She is the 2009 recipient of the Leonardo Da Vinci Prize, the highest honor given by the Society for the History of Technology to an individual who has greatly contributed to the history of technology through research, teaching, publications, and other activities. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband.