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 Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Wuhan Lockdown (2022), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009). His current work focuses on social media, narratives, and emotions in everyday activism, digital culture, and pandemic storytelling.

Yang has edited or co-edited seven books, including Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis (with Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan, 2024), Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production (with Wei Wang, 2021), Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Victor Pickard, 2017), The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China (with Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein, 2016), China's Contested Internet (NIAS Press, 2015), and Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (with Ching-Kwan Lee, 2007).

An elected Fellow of the International Communication Association, Professor Yang serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Forum, Social Media + Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Global Media and China, Chinese Journal of Sociology, China Information.  He also serves on the advisory boards of Emotions and Society and Asiascape: Digital Asia.  He received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Writing and Research Grant" (2003) and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. (2003-2004). Previously he taught as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and as an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University.

Yang tweets at @Yangguobin.