Chris Young is a Professor of Modern and Medieval German Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to his appointment as Master of St Edmund's College, he served as Head of the School of Arts and Humanities. A trained Germanist, Professor Young is also the Director of the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies and the founder and Director of the Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership, Cambridge’s first institution-wide partnership between Cambridge and any other university.

His primary teaching and research interests focus on medieval German literature and language, as well as the history of European sport, with a particular emphasis on German sport. He 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) also won the latter’s anthology prize. He curated a major exhibition this summer at the Fitzwilliam Museum on the 1924 Paris Olympics (best known through the film ‘Chariots of Fire’) and serves on the German government’s Historical Commission on the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.