Biography
Richard S. Young is a PhD candidate in History, specializing in digital humanities, digital history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. His dissertation explores the cultural history of happiness in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s, examining how psychology, advertising, and consumer culture shaped ideas about happiness in public policy, mass media, and everyday life.
Richard combines historical research with technical practice as a software engineer working with the University of Illinois archives and SourceLab, a digital publishing initiative in the History Department. His digital humanities work focuses on building software and computational infrastructure for historical research, digital scholarly editions, archival collections, and public-facing scholarship. He is particularly interested in computational text analysis, digital archival methods, and the use of emerging technologies - including artifical intelligence - to support new forms of historical research, interpretation, and scholarly communication.
He is an active member of SourceLab and contributes to the NEH funded project "No Longer at the Margins: Women in Science." His previous digital humanities work includes a collaboration with the Newberry Library, where he designed an audio tour accompanying the Chicago Avant Garde exhibition.
Research Interests
digital humanities; digital and public history; computational text analysis; the history of science, technology, and medicine; history of psychology; history of emotions; advertising and consumer culture; medical humanities; and twentieth-century U.S. cultural history
Grants
Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities & Arts