Professor Christopher Young

Christopher Young is co-curator of Paris 1924. Chris is Head of the School of Arts and Humanities and Fellow of Pembroke College. A Germanist by training, he is also Director of the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies, and founder and Director of the Cambridge-LMU Munich Strategic Partnership, Cambridge’s first institution-wide partnership with any university. He has primary teaching and research interests in medieval German literature and language and the history of European (and in particular German) sport.

Chris has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Cologne), a Permanent Visiting Fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien der FU Berlin (2010-12), a Visiting Fellow of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich (2018) and an Honorary Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg Munich (2018). His monograph ‘The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany’ (UC Press, 2010, with Kay Schiller) was the first book to win the prizes of both the British and North American Societies for sports history. In 2021, his ‘The Whole World was Watching. Sport in the Cold War’ (Stanford University Press, 2020, edited with Robert Edelman) also won the latter’s anthology prize.

Chris is currently completing a revisionist account of the 1936 Olympics, German sport in the interwar period, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. He has also recently been appointed to the German government’s international Historical Commission to reappraise the attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics.