Dr Yuchen Yang received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago, where he served as an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Sociology for the 2023-24 academic year. Before studying at UChicago, he received a BA with highest distinction in Sociology and Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr Yang’s research and teaching interests broadly include gender and (a)sexuality, family and childhood, culture and semiotics, social category and language use, as well as social theory and qualitative methodology. In his current research, Dr Yang brings together theoretical insights from feminist sociology, linguistic anthropology, ethnomethodology, and critical childhood studies to examine the semiotic process through which people reach certainty in their knowledge about gender and developmental differences as biological or social in nature. In the past, he has also studied cosplay participants’ collective embodiment of gender, asexual people’s experiences of high school sex talk, and Gramsci’s influence on Connell’s theorization of hegemonic masculinity.
His work has been published in Sociological Theory, Sexualities, and The Journal of Chinese Sociology, and received 11 awards from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and 6 Sections of the American Sociological Association (Theory, Sex & Gender, Sexualities, Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis, Body & Embodiment, History of Sociology & Social Thought). In 2025, he won the Junior Theorist Award from the ASA Theory Section and the Richard Saller Prize for the Most Outstanding Dissertation in the Social Sciences Division (across 8 disciplines) at the University of Chicago.
Currently, Dr Yang is a deputy editor of the new ASA journal, Sex & Sexualities, and serves on the editorial board of the interdisciplinary journal, Men and Masculinities.