A native Californian, Professor Young has studied at the State University of New York at Binghamton, The American University in Paris, and received his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote a dissertation entitled "Reading, Writing and Seduction: Eighteenth-Century Dangerous Practices". Professor Young's scholarly interests include questions of gender, sexuality and identity, as well as representation, early modern visual culture, and film.

Recently, he has written on gender roles in popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sequels, the question of sexual "identity" in eighteenth-century fiction, and the magic lantern (an early pre-cinematic device). Professor Young has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century French novel, and on Utopian fictions.