Sunyoung Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada, and her B.A. and M.A. from the Department of Sociology, Yonsei University, South Korea.
As a cultural anthropologist, she has conducted in-depth research on Internet development since 1999, specializing in South Korea. She is one of the founding members of the Haja Center (Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) run by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and Yonsei University. As a member of the Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG), she organized the second and third Asia Pacific Next Generation Camp, holding the positions of chair and vice chair. She also has participated in the Internet Governance Forum as a member of the Internet Society.
Sunyoung's research and teaching interests concentrate on the influence of new media and digital technologies on society with a focus on youth, labor, and gender issues in Korea and East Asia. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled Internet Freaks: Online User Communities and Cultural Politics in South Korea which examines the interwoven processes between Internet development and political-economic and socio-cultural changes in South Korea through the formation of new subjectivities of Internet users. She is conducting research on the formation of digital society in the Asia Pacific region as her second book project titled Making the Future Meaningful: Asia Pacific, Youths, and New Technologies.
Sunyoung also directs the Korean Studies program in the department and is a member of a university-wide collaborative and cross-disciplinary group forging exciting research agendas in the area of Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL).
Her long-term goal is to conduct ongoing participant observations of and write the real-time history of digital technologies and beyond, including the Internet, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.