Guobin Yang, Ph.D.

Director

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

Associate Director and Postdoctoral Fellow