Yuzhe (Julian) Lei

Yuzhe (Julian) Lei employs mixed methods to study political communication, with a particular focus on identity and identity-based political attitudes and behaviors in digital media settings.

Yuzhe (Julian) Lei is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in examining the role of identity in political communication through interdisciplinary and cross-paradigmatic perspectives. 

Acknowledging the increasingly multifaceted and intersectional nature of identity, he plans to integrate computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods to examine how individuals construct, negotiate, and curate complex identity systems, how social identities (e.g., class, race, gender, nationality) intersect with political identity to shape attitudes and behaviors, and how digital media environments mediate these identity-related dynamics. His research has been published in The International Journal of Press/Politics and presented at major conferences in communication and political science.

Before joining Annenberg, Yuzhe earned an M.A. in Journalism and Media from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.S.Sc. in Advertising from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his bachelor’s degree in Labor and Social Security, with a minor in Journalism, from Renmin University of China. In his free time, he enjoys watching movies, photography, city walking, and visiting museums.