Food and history have long been a part of Ashley Rose Young's life. Her mother’s family owns a gourmet grocery food business in the city of Pittsburgh, and her father, a history teacher, instilled his passion for American history in her and her three brothers. As a child, her summers were marked not by family vacations to Disney World, but by trips to historic sites such as Fort Ligonier, Gettysburg, and Colonial Williamsburg.

As a history major at Yale University, she was able to further explore her interests in a wide variety of courses ranging from Global Environmental History, to Ancient Egyptian History, to African American History Post-1865. Two terms abroad at Regent’s Park College at Oxford University introduced her to the fascinating history of court culture in Early Modern Europe, the anthropological study of ancient Etruscan civilization, and the rise of the Baptist faith in America. Perhaps one of the most pivotal moments in her undergraduate career was her Archives and Collections internship at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, which inspired her senior thesis on the ethnic and racial imagery in postbellum cookbooks, “‘Cooking in the Old Creole Days': An Exploration of Late 19th and Early 20th Century Creole Culture and Society Through the Study of Creole Cookbooks.”

As a PhD student at Duke University, she has sought to engage not only with the history department but also the Center for Documentary Studies, branching out into the study of oral histories. She has partnered with the Southern Foodways Alliance to profile the nationally known Carrboro Farmers’ Market through oral histories—a project that illuminated the highly political, rich culture of alternative foodways in North Carolina.