Richard Young

Richard S. Young is a third-year PhD candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His dissertation explores the cultural history of happiness in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing on how psychology, advertising, and consumer culture reshaped understandings of happiness in public policy, mass media, and everyday life. He is an active member of SourceLab, a digital publishing initiative in the History Department, and contributes to the NEH-funded project No Longer at the Margins: Women in Science. Richard also holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, where he worked with the Newberry Library on Chicago Avant Garde, designing an audio tour to accompany the exhibition.