ROBIN DARLING YOUNG, PH.D.

This year’s distinguished “Friend of the Armenians” award-winner, Robin Darling Young, Ph.D.,is Ordinary Professor, Emerita, of the History of Christianity at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her specialty is in the history of eastern Christianity in the ancient world, with a particular focus upon the interactions of the three main cultures of that world—Armenian, Greek and Syriac. She is particularly interested in the history of the ascetic movement—and in particular, in the thought and writings of Evagrius of Pontus, a saint celebrated in the Armenian calendar on February 11.

Professor Young is a native of Hampton, VA. She completed her undergraduate studies at Mary Washington College in 1972 and then worked at the Folger Shakespeare Library and as a journalist at a local weekly newspaper in Fairfax, VA. In 1974 she began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Christianity under the direction of Prof. Bernard M. McGinn with a dissertation “The Patriarchate of Severus of Antioch, 512-518.”

Having begun her teaching career at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., Professor Young studied in 1984-1985 at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Wolfson College. She began to study Classical Armenian there, under the instruction of Tübingen professor Gabriele Winkler, the noted historian of the liturgy. Upon returning to Washington, Professor Young began further studies in the Armenian language with Robert W. Thomson, Armenian Studies Professor at Harvard and Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Library. After her appointment to the faculty of The Catholic University of America, she completed her first Armenian publication, a translation of the 5th-century bishop Eznik of Kolb’s On God/ Against the Sects, with Monica Blanchard (Peters Press, 1998).

In 1997, Professor Young was visiting professor of Armenian Studies in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago; she taught for ten years at the University of Notre Dame (2003-2013), one year at the University of Virginia, after which she returned to Catholic University. As a scholar of the works of Evagrius of Pontus, she led a team that translated his Gnostic Trilogy (Oxford, 2024) but had already published, with her doctoral student Fr. Hovsep Karapetyan, Evagrius Ponticus, Letters: Armenian Translation (Peeters, 2002). In the next several years she plans to publish an English translation of the Synac version of his letters, along with a monograph on Evagrius’ life and thought.

Professor Young has been a longtime member of the Oriental Orthodox-Roman Catholic Dialogue and, as an admirer of Armenian culture, has tried to contribute to the study of Armenian language and history at The Catholic University, where the language has been taught since its founding in 1887. With Prof. Stefanos Alexopoulos, she remains co-director of the Institute for the Study of Eastern Christianity that hosts the Shahinian lecture series and other Armenian scholars who have brought the knowledge of Armenian culture to students and faculty at the University.

Prof. Young and her husband, Attorney Malcolm C. Young, are the parents of five children and six grandchildren.