Marilyn B. Young

Who is Marilyn B. Young?

Marilyn B. Young is an historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University.

Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia. She did her doctoral work 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. She taught at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before coming to NYU in 1980.

In 2000-2001 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 She was elected President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2011.