Sunyoung Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and her B.A. and M.A. from the Department of Sociology at Yonsei University, South Korea.
As a cultural anthropologist, she has conducted in-depth research on Internet development since 1999, specializing in South Korea and the Asia Pacific region. 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 Next Generation (APNG), she organized the second and third Asia Pacific Next Generation Camps, holding the positions of chair and vice chair in 2002 and 2003, and revived the APNG Camp as chair in 2024. She has also participated in the Internet Governance Forum as a member of the Internet Society.
Sunyoung's research and teaching interests focus on the influence of new media and digital technologies on society, with a particular emphasis on youth, labor, and gender issues in Korea and East Asia. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled 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. Her second book project, tentatively titled Making the Future Meaningful: Asia Pacific, Youths, and New Technologies, examines the enduring technological utopianism, aiming not to discard it but to deconstruct and redirect people's shared yearning for a better future.
Sunyoung also directs the Korean Studies program in her department and is a member of a university-wide collaborative and cross-disciplinary group that is forging exciting research agendas in the area of Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL).
Her long-term goal is to conduct ongoing participant observations and write the real-time history of digital technologies and beyond, including the Internet, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.