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
HIST 1025 - American History since 1865
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Spring 2018 / Spring 2019
Explores political, social and cultural changes in American life since Reconstruction. Focuses on shifting social and political relations as the U.S. changed from a nation of farmers and small-town dwellers to an urban, industrial society; the changing meaning of American identity in a society divided by ethnicity, race and class; and the emergence of the U.S. as a world power.
HIST 3020 - Historical Thinking & Writing
Primary Instructor
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Fall 2019
Develops the research techniques and habits of mind required to succeed in the History major, honing students' critical, analytical, and synthetic skills while introducing them to History as a discipline and a way of understanding the world. Students practice the kinds of writing required in upper-division History classes. Topics will vary. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours.
HIST 4416 - Environmental History of North America
Primary Instructor
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Fall 2018 / Fall 2019
Examines how people of North America, from precolonial times to the present, interact with, altered, and thought about the natural world. Key themes include Native American land uses; colonization and ecological imperialism; environmental impacts of food and agriculture; industrialization, urbanization and pollution; energy transitions; cultures of environmental appreciation; the growth of the conversation and environmental movements.
HIST 6420 - Memory and History in Transnational Perspective
Primary Instructor
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Fall 2018
Engages in debates about historical methods and how the past is represented. Central topics will include memory and the forces of nationalism and war; commemoration and monuments; the role of memory in the construction of race and ethnicity; personal past and cultural remembrance; and the relationships between academic, public, and popular histories.
