Representation, appearances: Please contact Philippa Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistics, flip@sll.com

Brooke Kroeger is a journalist, professor emerita at NYU, and the author of six books, the latest of which is Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism,  published by A.A. Knopf in May 2023. It explores how women have fared in American journalism’s most competitive and highly valued bastions, the ones men have dominated in the 180 years since mass media began. More recently, Thornwillow Press published her chapbook A Journalist at War (2025), and she wrote the introductions to two collections of the works of late 19th century journalists: Campaigns of Curiosity by Elizabeth L. Banks (Columbia Global Reports, October 2025) and  The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan (Penguin Random House 2024.) She also co-edited Front Pages Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage with Linda Steiner and Carolyn Kitch (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which includes her chapter on the Suffragents, the men who. helped women win the vote.

For The American Scholar, her latest are“Words, Words, Words,”a review of Marjorie Garber’s A Treacherous Secret Agent and a long article about the wartime lives of Helen Paull Kirkpatrick and her brother, Lyman Bickford Kirkpatrick, Jr, “The Go-Between: One of America’s Most Celebrated Women War Correspondents Walked a Fine Line Between Journalism and Espionage.”She has been featured on numerous public programs and podcasts, as a go-to expert on women in journalism, especially Nellie Bly; Fannie Hurst, undercover reporting, and men in the movement for woman suffrage.

Her earlier books are  Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994, an NPR Best Books of the Year);  Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst (1998, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Books of the Year); Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (2003, a Post-Dispatch Best Books of the Year); Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012, finalist, Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award of the American Journalism Historians Association), and The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Gold Medal in US History in the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards and a finalist for the 2018 Sally and Morris Lasky Prize of the Center for Political History.) Find selections from her journalism and her appearances, by category, here.

At NYU, she served on the journalism faculty from 1998 to 2021 and from 2005 to 2011 was department chair and founding director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She created the MA unit Global and Joint Program Studies and directed this joint program field of study from 2007 to 2020.

Early in her career, she was UN Correspondent for Newsday and deputy metropolitan editor for New York Newsday. Over eleven years with United Press International (in its Scripps Howard days), she reported from Chicago, Brussels, London and Tel Aviv, where she was bureau chief (1980-83) before returning to London to become the agency’s division editor for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (1983-84).

She led the team of scholars who created the database SuffrageandtheMedia.org and American Journalism‘s April 2019 special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”

She was a Senior Fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University from 2013 until its closing in 2019, served for many years on the editorial board of the scholarly journal, American Journalism: A Journal of Media History, and until 2024 on the New York Public Library’s awards committee for its Helen Bernstein Awards for Excellence in Journalism. Before its spend-down, she judged the Hellman-Hammett Grants and has been a judge for both the National Book Awards and the LA Times Book Award.

Her digital projects include the online database  undercoverreporting.org; a major independent report on WNYC’s digital transformation from 2010-13;  Blowing Minds: The Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press (1965-72) about the life and times of the East Village Other; Primary Sources, an archive of significant journalism-related conversations with major figures, produced on video; and, in collaboration with other NYU Journalism colleagues and the New York Times, the Local East Village (2009-2013), and from 2013-2020, Bedford + Bowery with New York Magazine.

Brooke can be reached by email at brooke [dot] kroeger [at] nyu [dot] edu.