EIU Media Relations

Colleagues Honor Young with 2012 Distinguished Faculty Award

Bailey K. Young -- a professor of medieval history, French history, and archeology -- was honored with Eastern Illinois University's 2012 Distinguished Faculty Award by the Faculty Senate.

Young studied Merovingian archaeology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etude in France. From 1975 to 1987, he lived in France, doing research with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, holding visiting appointments with the Universities of Paris XII and Lille III, and working on medieval excavations in Paris, Burgundy and Montpellier.

Before joining Eastern’s Department of History in 1994, he taught at Loyola in Chicago and Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. In 1998, in collaboration with EIU’s Honors and Continuing Education programs and in partnership with the Centre de Recherches d’Archéologie National in Louvain, he launched a Summer Archaeology Program that sends American students to Belgium to help excavate Walhain Castle alongside Belgian students.

Young has published widely, including in French journals. Recent studies in English include “The Iconography of Personal Objects: Hints of Do-it-Yourself Christianity in Merovingian Gaul” (2009), and a study of the Merovingian collection at the Spurlock Museum in Urbana (2011) based on an exhibit he curated with co-author Barbara Oelschlager-Garvey of the Early American Museum.

He is a founding member of the association Francaise d’Archéologie Mérovingienne, and a contributing editor to the Journal of Late Antiquity. In 2011, Belgian cultural television filmed his team at work at Walhain Castle and came to EIU for a 90-minute special on castles in Wallonia that was broadcast on Belgian television in May 2012.