  Massive stars are strong sources of far-ultraviolet radiation that can be
hostile to the evolution of protoplanetary disks, driving mass loss by external
photoevaporation and shortening disk-dissipation timescales. Their effect may
also reduce the timescale of angular momentum exchanges between the disk and
host star during the early pre-main-sequence phase. To improve our
understanding of the environmental influence on the rotational history of
stars, we developed a model that considers the influence of the local
far-ultraviolet radiation on the spin evolution of low mass stars. Our model
includes an assumption of disk-locking, which fixes the rotation rate during
the star-disk-interaction phase, with the duration of this phase parametrised
as a function of the local far-ultraviolet radiation and stellar mass (in the
range 0.1--1.3 M$_\odot$). In this way, we demonstrate how the feedback from
massive stars can significantly influence the spin evolution of stars and
explain the mass-dependency observed in period-mass distributions of young
regions like Upper Sco and NGC 2264. The high far-ultraviolet environments of
high-mass stars can skew the period distribution of surrounding stars towards
fast-rotation, explaining the excess of fast-rotating stars in the open cluster
h Per. The proposed link between rotation and the pre-main-sequence environment
opens new avenues for interpreting the rotational distributions of young stars.
For example, we suggest that stellar rotation may be used as a tracer for the
primordial ultraviolet irradiation for stars up to $\sim$1 Gyr, which offers a
potential method to connect mature planetary systems to their birth
environment.
