Dr. Bo Yun Park

Dr. Bo Yun Park is a sociologist whose research lies at the intersections of political, cultural, and transnational sociology. She is particularly interested in political leadership, digital politics, technology, and social change in democracies under stress. Her recent work investigates how political strategists in France and the United States craft narratives of political leadership for presidential candidates in the digital age. More specifically, she examines how their use of social media and big data analytics has affected the scripts of political leadership in recent years. 

Park received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, where she was affiliated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. She earned a B.A. (Barnard College) and M.A. (Sciences Po Paris) in political science via the Columbia University - Sciences Po Five-Year B.A./M.A. Program. She also holds an A.M. in sociology from Harvard. Prior to joining the University of Richmond, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Social Science Data Lab (D-Lab) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her work has been published in the “Oxford Handbook of Political Consumerism” and “The Handbook on the Politics of Higher Education.” She has also co-authored articles that have been published in Nature Human Behavior, Poetics, British Journal of Sociology, and the Harvard Business Review. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, BBC Radio ̶  The World, the Harvard Gazette, and the Women in Data Science Conference co-organized by Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Microsoft. For more information, please visit her personal website at boyunpark.com.