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

A Granted Prayer: An unpublished story by Edith Wharton (The Atlantic)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on Edith Wharton’s short fiction, Sarah Whitehead, an independent scholar in London, came across the typescript of an unpublished story, titled “A Granted Prayer,” in the Wharton archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.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.
'Lost' letters reveal JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson's mutual affection (The Guardian)
October 25, 2020
Dr Michael Shaw, a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Stirling, came across the letters while researching a box of correspondence at Beinecke Library in Yale University. The letters had been acquired by the collector Edwin J.Beinecke in the 1950s and were catalogued and listed in the library archive.
New Scholarship: Ben Glaser "Modernism's Metronome"
October 19, 2020

Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics by Ben Glaser; forthcoming from Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press From the publisher: Despite...
Art & Protest: A Conversation
October 14, 2020

See, download, and share poster From the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street , Bolotnaya Square to Nuit debout , the Arab Spring , the Movement of the...
Beinecke Library 2019-2020 Annual Report
October 9, 2020

The Beinecke Library 2019-2020 Annual Report, including stories, statistics, and selected recent acquisitions, can be read and downloaded here: Beinecke...
A joy glimpsed: Introducing an unpublished story by Edith Wharton (TLS)
September 18, 2020
“The Children’s Hour”, which has remained unpublished until now, charts an afternoon in the life of a Catholic priest.
New Scholarship: Margaret Woodward "Listening in the Anthropocene"
September 2, 2020
Recent Visiting Research Fellow Margaret Woodward delivers “Listening in the Anthropocene” conference keynote address
NEW RESEARCH: Richard Deming on Orson Welles's Touch of Evil
May 30, 2020
Richard Deming, Director of Yale's Creative Writing Program, explores Orson Welles's film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil in the British Film Institue's Classics Series
Preserving the Great American Opera (Humanities Magazine, NEH)
May 12, 2020
After combing through the opera’s early performance materials, most of which are housed at the Library of Congress and at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Shirley has produced a critical edition of Porgy and Bess and, in collaboration with the Gershwin Initiative, has also produced the opera’s definitive performing edition, including newly edited orchestral and piano-vocal scores, and a new choral score.