Marilyn Young

Marilyn B. Young is a professor of history at New York University (NYU). She has been with the university since 1980. Professor Young teaches courses on the history of U.S. foreign policy, the politics and culture of post-war U.S., as well as courses on the history of modern China, and the history and culture of Vietnam.

She received her Ph.D. at Harvard University under the direction of Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and John King Fairbank, an historian of China. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, "The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901," which examined the American Open Door Notes and the international diplomacy of the Boxer Uprising. Before NYU, she taught at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Professor Young has twice been awarded a Golden Dozen Teaching Award and, from 1993-1996, served as chair of the Department of History at NYU. In 2000–01, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Society Fellowship, and the Berkshire Women's History Prize for "The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990." From 2001-2004, she directed the NYU International Center for Advanced Studies Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict. In the spring of 2005, she was a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Center in Bologna, Italy. In 2011, she was elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.