Guobin Yang, Ph.D.

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society. He is the author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016) and the award–winning The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009). Currently, he is writing a book on the lockdown of Wuhan due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The book is tentatively entitled Lockdown: The Story of the Coronavirus in Wuhan, China, and is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Yang is the editor or co–editor of five books: Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production (with Wei Wang, forthcoming), Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Victor Pickard, 2017), China’s Contested Internet (2015), The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (with Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, 2016), and Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (with Ching–Kwan Lee, 2007). Previously he taught as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii–Manoa and as an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature with a specialty in Literary Translation from Beijing Foreign Studies University and a second Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University.

Natacha Yazbeck, Ph.D.

Associate Director and Postdoctoral Fellow

Natacha Yazbeck is the Associate Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center. She is a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a recipient of the 2020 Leeway Transformation Award.

A multimedia journalist, storyteller and former foreign correspondent, her research focuses on race, rights and invisible structures of discrimination that have survived the digital transition in journalism. Her literary nonfiction work and photography have been published by Penguin, Polity, Sage and Getty Images. She is most recently the author of “Spin,” featured in Our Women on the Ground (Penguin, 2019), the first anthology of essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world. Prior to joining the Center, Yazbeck covered conflict, politics and society in Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen for close to a decade for Agence France-Presse (AFP). Yazbeck is also a consultant on media, digital equity and human rights. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Communication from Annenberg and an M.A. in Sociology from the American University of Beirut. During her fellowship, she will be working on a book manuscript examining the impact of digitization on war and its coverage, trauma and memory.