Marilyn B. Young

In 2000–01 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies 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.

While in graduate school she met and married Ernest P. Young, an historian of China described by a friend as her "early intellectual companion." They separated and then divorced in 1986.

Young joined the faculty at NYU in 1980. Young founded the Women Studies Department at NYU and, from 1993 to 1996, she was the chairwoman of its history department. Young was a co-director of the Tamiment Library's Center for the United States and the Cold War. She became president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2011.

In the late 1960s, as part of her opposition to the American war in Vietnam, she was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Many of her subsequent writings concerned this and following American wars. She recalled in her presidential address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations:

She graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1953 and Vassar College in 1957. 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 moving to NYU in 1980.

Marilyn B. Young (April 25, 1937 – February 19, 2017) was a historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University.