Yang Su

Professor, Department of Sociology, UC Irvine

Professor Su is a scholar of political violence, revolution and social movements. He studies historical movements as well as contemporary protests with a focus on the role of the state. He is author of Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2011), which received the 2022 Barrington Moore Book Prize in comparative and historical sociology and honorable mention of the 2022 Charles Tilly Book Award in the studies of collective behavior and social movements, and Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre (Cambridge, 2023), which received honorable mention of the 2024 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award of the American Sociological Association. His journal articles in other research areas include an Annual Review Sociology piece on genocide and mass killing, a series of publications on labor protest in contemporary China and a couple of papers on social movements in the U.S. Methodologically, he was trained both as an ethnographer and a statistician. His current teaching portfolio at UCI includes “Comparative Contentious Politics” and “Sociology of Knowledge Production” for graduate students and “Protest, Social Movements and Revolution” and “Socialism and Socialist Societies” for undergraduate students.

His CV can be found here.