During his graduate studies, he taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis for two years, then returned to Harvard to finish the doctorate.
Young's research on what he called "liturgical drama" began with a publication in 1908; he relied heavily on Charles Magnin's notion that modern European theatre performance originated in the Catholic Mass, in the Quem quaeritis Trope.
This thesis, also propagated and widely disseminated by Léon Gautier, was brought to an even wider and anglophone audience through Young's The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933), which was reprinted several times and often taught at universities.
Later scholars criticized Young's model, claiming that it misunderstood the diverse and manifold liturgical culture of medieval Christianity, in which certain roles and tropes are legitimate elements of the liturgy and not necessarily self-conscious dramatic performance.
[3] He died in New Haven, Connecticut; a collection of his personal notes and scholarly files (mostly concerning medieval liturgy) is a part of the holdings at Yale University Music Library.