Young is a historian of the 19th and 20th-century U.S. with interests in culture, the environment, public memory, and the American West. Her current work concerns the history of camping and sleeping outside since the mid-19th century and examines the shifting understandings of nature as public space. This will result in the publication of a book with Oxford Univ. Press. She is co-editor of an anthology entitled Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics published in 2015 by the Univ. of Penn. Press; this includes a co-authored introduction and a single-authored essay on the tent and the Occupy movement. Her 2006 book, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Univ. of Calif. Press) discussed built environment, ethnic identity, and regional culture. Both works concern the process of place-making through the historical relationships between material spaces, social practice, and cultural expression. New interests include SoTL and digital history/pedagogy.
keywords
American cultural history, environment, public memory, popular culture, ethnicity, scholarship of teaching and learning, American West, outdoor recreation, homelessness, digital history
