Current Research

We are always eager to help spread the word about new scholarship from our collections and we frequently post notices about books, articles, and conference presentations that have benefited from research in our reading room or using our online resources.

Students, scholars, and fellows are invited and encouraged to let us know about new work drawn from the Beinecke Library’s collections.  Please send a citation, summary, and information about Beinecke collections consulted by following this link: New Scholarship from Beinecke: Submissions.

New Scholarship

  • The Stone Heads of 320 York

    April 12, 2021

    But the heads embedded in the entrance archway were not mentioned as part of that initial scandal. So we did some digging in the Beinecke Library’s archives and found a typewritten account by one of the workmen involved in the planning of the building, Wesley Needham. Needham was quite a character. He served as an adviser in Tibetan literature at the Yale University Library and had no training in architecture except “through the study of books on architecture borrowed from the New Haven Public Library.” Nonetheless, he served as a draftsman in the construction of 320 York Street as one of what he estimated as about eighty-five draftsmen serving under the chief architect, James Gamble Rogers. These people drew up plans and created drawings of proposed carvings, which they submitted, in the case of the Hall of Graduate Studies, to the architect John Donald Tuttle for approval. Needham recalled working on a “series of snails” to be molded over the windows in the lounge: “Tuttle didn’t mention what they symbolized (possibly the slow pace of graduate students on their way to a higher degree),” a surprisingly painstaking project that went through a number of drafts. Needham dryly comments, “Now when I look at them, I wonder if they were worth so much effort.”

  • ‘A Whole World’ is a new book of poet James Merrill’s letters (The Day)

    April 8, 2021

    The renowned Stonington poet and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill was incredibly prolific. Not only was his most famous poem, "The Changing Light at Sandover," 560 pages long — and written with the aid of his trusted Ouija board that still exists in the poet's former house in Stonington Borough — Merrill wrote hundreds of poems and was also a novelist, playwright, and essayist.

  • How Can We Read Edith Wharton Today? (New York Times)

    January 20, 2021

    “The Custom of the Country” (1913), like much that Edith Wharton wrote, can be described as a novel of manners. That’s to say, a social fiction in which the carefully observed customs of a particular society shape the characters’ actions and the plot. The designation somehow implies frivolity, or at least, traditionally, the feminine or domestic sphere (Jane Austen could be considered the first author of such works); and in this period of profound crisis in American society, it might seem easy to dismiss the relevance of such diverting works.

  • Robert Bolick on Erica Van Horn

    January 4, 2021

    Writer and artist Erica Van Horn is featured by curator Robert Bolick in his Books on Books series: Books on Books: Erica Van Horn . Bolick considers works...

  • Visual Resources of the Middle East

    December 2, 2020

    Yale University holds a wide array of images from the Middle East across its encyclopedic collections. The goal of the Visual Resources of the Middle East (VRME) project is to house highlights from different collections onto one platform. These highlights are an introduction into the vast holdings at Yale, with the aim of opening the holdings to a diverse audience at and beyond Yale.

  • A Granted Prayer: An unpublished story by Edith Wharton (The Atlantic)

    November 9, 2020

    While doing postdoctoral research for a project on Edith Wharton’s short fiction, Sarah Whitehead, an independent scholar in London, came across the typescript of an unpublished story, titled “A Granted Prayer,” in the Wharton archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.

  • Rituals of Housekeeping, Memories of Home: On Marilynne Robinson’s First Novel (LitHub)

    October 29, 2020

    Robinson began working on the novel in the mid to late 1970s when she was establishing housekeeping herself, presumably in Seattle, Washington, where she was a student in the English PhD program. She also had two young sons and worked on the book at night, writing by hand while they were sleeping. Her notebooks from this period, housed in the archives of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, offer a sense of her life at the time.