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 state’s role. He is author of Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge 2011) and Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre (Cambridge 2023). Extremely sensitive to cruelty and violence, he ended up having to deal with them closely in multiple times. Along this line, his teaching includes a graduate seminar on mass killings and genocide (co-teaching with David Snow). His journal articles in other research areas include a series of co-authored publications on labor protest in contemporary China. Methodologically he was trained both as an ethnographer and a statistician. Among his other courses at UCI include “Comparative Contentious Politics” and “History and Sociology of Scientific Inquiry” for graduate students and “Revolution, Protest and Social Movements” and “Socialism and Socialist Countries” for undergraduate students.