
People
Director
Postdoctoral Fellows
Core Faculty
Graduate Students
Research Affiliates
Partners
Director

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.
Postdoctoral Fellows

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.

Emily Hund
Emily Hund, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Her research interests include social media, consumer culture, and technology and creative industries. Her work focuses on social media influencers, particularly on Instagram, and has been published in the International Journal of Communication, Social Media + Society, and Communication, Culture & Critique. Dr. Hund’s writing and commentary has also appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Wired. During the fellowship, she is developing a book manuscript about the rise and ramifications of the influencer economy.
Core Faculty

Ezekiel Dixon-Román Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Social Policy

David Grazian, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of Urban Studies

John L. Jackson, Jr., Ph.D.
Walter H. Annenberg Dean and Richard Perry University Professor

Sarah J. Jackson, Ph.D.
Presidential Associate Professor

Jessa Lingel, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communication

Ben Shestakofsky Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Julia Ticona, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communication

Joseph Turow, Ph.D.
Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication

Barbie Zelizer, Ph.D.
Raymond Williams Professor of Communication
Graduate Students

Farrah Rahaman

Ryan Tsapatsaris

Diami Virgilio

Andrew Wirzburger

Staci L. Jones

Florence Zivaishe Madenga
Research Affiliates
Melissa Aronczyk
Rutgers University
Moya Bailey
Northeastern University
Meredith Broussard
New York University
Craig Calhoun
Arizona State University
Angelé Christin
Stanford University
Meredith Clark
University of Virginia
Rosemary Clark-Parsons
Brooke Duffy
Cornell University
Jasmine Erdener
Johan Farkas
Malmö University
Elisabetta Ferrari
Kishonna Gray
University of Illinois at Chicago
Emily Dean Hund
University of Pennsylvania
Catherine Knight Steele
University of Maryland
Jeffrey Lane
Rutgers University
Jun Liu
University of Copenhagen
Carrie A. Rentschler
McGill University
Jen Schradie
Sciences Po
Angela Xiao Wu
New York University
Lin Zhang
University of New Hampshire
Our Partners

Center for Media at Risk

Media Activism Research Collective (MARC)

Media, Inequality and Change Center (MIC)
