Student Research

Below you will find exemplars of research done by Yale University and other students in the Beinecke Library. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student conducting research in our collections, we’d love to publish a description of your work on our website. Please go to the Student Scholars - Tell Us about your Research page for more information on how to submit your research for inclusion here.

  • Through Justice’s Papers, Students See Supreme Court Behind the Scenes

    December 19, 2023

    In a first-of-its-kind course this fall, Yale Law School students delved into the working papers of a former Supreme Court justice for an intimate view of the making of landmark decisions. Through hands-on use of these archival materials, students gained research skills once used mainly by scholars but now increasingly valuable for legal practitioners. Taught by lecturers in legal research Nicholas Mignanelli and Michael VanderHeijden, Research Methods in Judicial History centered around the papers of Associate Justice Potter Stewart ’41, which are held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Through Stewart’s papers, the course explored how judges and legal scholars use historical court materials to make sense of judicial decisions.

  • Students win prizes for essays on American and Western American history and culture

    May 26, 2023

    At this year’s graduation ceremonies, three prizes were awarded to Yale College seniors whose essays explored topics in the fields of Americana or Western Americana. Unlike the library’s three other senior essay prizes—for which students submit their own work for consideration—these prizes are awarded based on recommendations from faculty members. Each prize winner received $200 and an award certificate.

  • Wright Lab summer undergraduate researchers explore scientific treasures of Yale Beinecke Library

    July 14, 2022

    Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Beinecke) and the Medical Historical Library together house early editions of many milestones of achievements in physics, including those from Copernicus, du Châtelet, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and other scientists from the 16th-18th centuries, with topics ranging from early materials science, astronomy and cosmology, physics, and mathematics.

  • Student curator Gabrielle Colangelo ’22 brings obscured lesbian histories to light

    June 6, 2022

    For her exhibition, “We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive,” now on view in Sterling Memorial Library, student curator Gabrielle “Gabby” Colangelo ’22, began by asking questions. “Why are there so few lesbians represented in Yale’s archives? And who is Silvia Dobson, this unknown woman who appears so prominently in my search results?”

  • Interlaced geometric designs surrounding red and black text in the Syriac script.

    Hidden Gems

    April 18, 2022

    Hidden Gems Welcome to Hidden Gems , a series of short articles which highlight items in the Beinecke Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts and...
  • An image of a manuscript page with a rubricated initial and black text in gothic script.

    Takamiya MS 98: An Excised Fragment of the Stafford Gower

    March 27, 2022

    Beinecke manuscript fragment Takamiya MS 98 once belonged to a 14th-century manuscript known as the Stafford Gower (Huntington Library MS EL 26 A 17), a copy of John Gower's Middle English poem "Confessio Amantis." It was excised and used as binding waste.

  • Students present research detailing Yale’s history with slavery (Yale Daily News)

    February 4, 2022

    On Monday, three students from the “Slavery, Race and Yale” fall seminar shared historical findings about the University’s ties to slavery. The students spoke virtually at a Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library event entitled “Yale & Slavery Research — Student Perspectives.” Taught by Professors Edward Rugemer and Crystal Feimster with teaching fellow Teanu Reid, the “Slavery, Race and Yale” seminar developed from the Yale and Slavery Research Project and its mission to explore and detail Yale’s history with racial slavery from its inception in 1701 through the late-19th century. Miguel Ceballo-Countryman ’23, Patrick Hayes ’24 and Mackenzie Hawkins ’22 each dis

  • An image of a manuscript page with illuminated and rubricated initials and black text.

    Osborn fa38: An Early Copy of Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica

    January 18, 2022

    Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica, composed in Latin and completed in Paris in the 1170s, was one of the key texts for historical and scriptural education among schoolmen throughout the Middle Ages. The Beinecke Library is fortunate to possess an early copy of this important medieval text: Osborn fa38, which was produced in England at the priory of Rochester Cathedral.

  • Detail, Persian MSS 165. Page featuring a small blue, red, and gold 'unvan or headpiece and Persian script in three columns.

    Persian Manuscripts

    October 21, 2021

    Persian carries with it a long history of vivid storytelling, of poetic power, and of beautiful books. Today, Persian is the language of Iran, but it has long been in an impressive geographic range and for diverse texts and traditions. During the Middle Ages, a virtuosic tradition of miniature painting was cultivated in Persian manuscript production which endured well into the modern period. Mesmerizing use of pattern, color, and composition marks an illumination practice with many beautiful witnesses still extant in the twenty-first century.

  • A manuscript diagram of the Greek letter delta labelled with Arabic text in red.

    Beinecke Coptic MS 13

    October 1, 2021

    Beinecke Coptic MS 13: The Book of the Coptic Language The Treatise on the Mystery of Letters is a tractate attributed to Apa Seba (supposedly Sabbas the...

  • Yale student presents a virtual exhibit on Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Yale Daily News)

    September 20, 2021

    rodey conceived of this idea in a seminar she took during her sophomore year, “Art of the Printed Word,” taught by Richard Rose, a printer at the Yale School of Art. In an essay assignment, she compared the 1832 Philadelphia publication of “Pride and Prejudice” with the 2010 Belknap-Harvard annotated edition. Over the next year and a half, Brodey continued to reflect on how publishers treat and present the same text in different ways. Eventually, it became the leading theme of her exhibit. Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, advised the project. Kuhl brainstormed with Brodey about how she could use the collection’s objects to illustrate her ideas and arguments in a compelling way. “Working online required changing some of our work processes but the payoff is the opportunity to share [Brodey’s] excellent exhibition with a large online audience that might never visit New Haven to see it in person,” Kuhl said. “Besides, her detailed research and thorough knowledge made our work easy.”

  • Fellowship winners will study next at Oxford and Cambridge

    May 11, 2021

    Emma Brodey ’21 has been awarded the King’s-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in English at Cambridge University, where she will study 18th-century and Romantic literature and the history of the book. At Yale, she is an English major focusing her studies on 19th-century English literature and creative nonfiction. Her academic thesis explored Jane Austen and George Eliot’s novels through the lens of material texts and the embodiment of the 19th-century woman reader. Her creative thesis was a memoir about the role of Austen in her own family. Brodey has also studied letterpress printing, helps lead the Yale Guild of Bookmakers, and often teaches bookbinding workshops for the Yale community. She works as a research assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her most recent curated exhibit, “Publication and Prejudice” focuses on copies of “Pride and Prejudice” in the Yale Library collections.

  • Exhibit on Edith Wharton, fiction and interior design opens online (Yale Daily News)

    March 14, 2021

    In an online exhibition called “Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room,” Julia Carabatsos ’20 uses drawing rooms as a lens to look at Wharton’s novels and her ideas on interior design. The exhibit explores the connections between Wharton’s fiction — the work she is best known for — and Wharton’s passion for interior design.

  • 2020 Yale College Poets Reading Now Online

    April 21, 2020

    The annual Yale College Poets Reading sponsored by Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) reading series, cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program in...

  • Listening to Will Wilson’s Portraits (Yale Herald)

    November 18, 2019

    Today wet-plate collodion photography is, unsurprisingly, scarce, enabling the materialization of Wilson’s three figures in PNGB to serve as a bait-and-switch: their initial perceived age soon deteriorates into their present reality. Unlike in Curtis’s images, each subject has chosen their own pose and clothing, has written their own caption, and has been gifted the aluminum plate — the reproductions we see in the YUAG exhibition are archival pigment prints from a high-resolution scan of the original, on loan from the Beinecke. The photographic exchange is literal, as is Wilson’s reinscription of Indigenous culture, both shifting the seat of influence towards equality.

  • ‘Shape, contour, and respect’ — 200 years of indigenous art on view at Yale

    November 11, 2019

    It is the first exhibition to display indigenous works from the Yale Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The show features basketry, beadwork, drawings, photographs, pottery, textiles, and wooden carvings from the early 19th century to the present day, representing more than 40 indigenous nations. It presents the objects as works of art, not historical artifacts.

  • Into the archives! (Yale Daily News)

    October 31, 2019

    "Last spring, I sat in the Beinecke Library’s Reading Room, poring over a manuscript copy of Hannah Crafts’ “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” I saw the meandering cursive writings on the page and where she must have pressed her pen harder into the paper, creating blotches of ink. I was writing a paper about the novel for my English seminar and had read the version I’d gotten from the Yale Bookstore for class. But seeing the manuscript version brought the text alive in a way it hadn’t been before; I felt closer to the author, closer to the words."

  • New Scholarship: Jennifer Carr on Didier Mutel

    May 22, 2019

    "Acid Reams: The Corrosive Craft of Didier Mutel" A pop-up exhibition curated by Jennifer Carr in Professor Karin Roffman’s Literary Biography: Archives and Life Stories master class at Beinecke Library, May 2019

  • New Scholarship: Nicholas Forster on Thornton Wilder

    May 21, 2019

    Reawakening the Fields of Observation and Reflection: Thornton Wilder’s One-Act Sins -- A pop-up exhibition curated by Nicholas Forster in Professor Karin Roffman’s Literary Biography: Archives and Life Stories master class at Beinecke Library, May 2019

  • New Scholarship: Deborah Streahle on Larry Kramer

    May 21, 2019

    Larry Kramer: Crisis and Care -- A pop-up exhibition curated by Deborah Streahle in Professor Karin Roffman's Literary Biography: Archives and Life Stories master class at Beinecke Library, May 201

  • Female American Poets: Archival Connections

    April 16, 2019

    The next poet in our series, Female American Poets: Archival Connections, is Maya Angelou. A poet, autobiographer, activist, and director, Angelou explores sound, memory, and sexuality in her poetry and prose. Her work investigates and colors the history of Black oppression, activism, and power in America.

  • Nathan Brown’s “Elevations”

    February 25, 2019

    Nathan Brown Y’19 has explored Beinecke Library collection materials in "Elevations," his Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project

  • Female American Poets: Archival Connections

    November 12, 2018

    The series begins with poet Muriel Rukeyser and will weave through various poets of the twentieth century, using Beinecke’s collections as a means of connecting disparate figures to one another.

  • New Acquisition: Orson Welles Scripts

    October 26, 2018

    The Beinecke has recently acquired new Orson Welles materials, including an unproduced screenplay, the original script of a 1943 film, and a second draft of Welles’ famous film Citizen Kane with accompanying notes.

  • Poetry and Objects

    August 2, 2018

    Well known on campus and around the world as a site of important historical documents of all kinds, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript is also a regional and national center of the living art of American Poetry.

  • The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

    NEW SCHOLARSHIP: Luke Chang on Moby Dick

    May 8, 2018

    Luke Chang, Y’18, wrote his senior thesis about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick , consulting 19th century editions of the novel and related works in the Yale...

  • New Student Research

    March 19, 2018

    “The Cave that Consecrates History” by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen Y’20, was written in the spring or 2017 for Professor Dixa Ramírez’s course Travel Literature of...

  • Student Curators

    December 29, 2017

    Student curators in Melissa Barton’s African American Literature in the Archive (ENG 221/AFAM 212) class organized miny “Pop-Up” exhibitions from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection as a class assignment in November.

  • The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

    The Blind Man

    November 21, 2017

    Fascimile editions of New York Dada Magazines from Ugly Duckling Presse edited by Beinecke Library Research Fellow Sophie Seita FROM THE PUBLISHER: The Blind...
  • The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

    New Student Research

    November 1, 2017

    Strong Cards: Thornton Wilder and Mia Farrow research in the Thornton Wilder Papers By Raffi Donatich, Y’2019 After the release of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s...

  • New Student Research by Kelsea Jeon

    August 30, 2017

    During the Antebellum Era, abolitionists largely appealed to individuals’ morals when advocating for the anti-slavery cause.

  • From the Archive: New Poems by George Oppen

    January 9, 2017

    New Poems by George Oppen David B. Hobbs, “A Brief Introduction to 21 Poems by George Oppen,” in Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 40, Number 1, Fall 2016,...

  • New Scholarship: “Bright” Oscar Moore

    October 5, 2016

    In a new exhibition at Sterling Memorial Library, Yale African American Studies graduate student Camille Owens pieces together the biography of “Bright” Oscar Moore, a black child prodigy who toured and performed in the United States during the late 19th century.

  • New Student Research

    December 22, 2014

    “Desire to Capture, Desire to Expose: The Scrapbook of H.D.,” by Caroline Sydney, Y2016 , written for Professor Laura Wexler’s Photography and Memory...

  • New Scholarship: Julie Botnick on Dorothy Porter's Life and Work

    May 23, 2014

    In July 1968, as Howard University’s James M. Nabrit, Jr. stepped down from his role as president amid student protests, Dorothy Porter wrote to friends and colleagues to invite them to her workshop on the topic of “Bibliographic Resources for a Study of the American Negro.”

  • WALDEN by Ana Maria Gomez Lopez

    May 1, 2014

    New work by Yale School of Art graduate student Ana Maria Gomez Lopez will be featured in Walden , an upcoming exhibition at the deCordova Museum exploring the...

  • New Student Research

    April 29, 2014

    “Landscapes of Violence in One Big Self,” by Sylvia McNamara, Yale College Class of 2015 written for Dr. Dolores Hayden’s class: Poets’ Landscapes (AMST 381a/...

  • Solar: New Work by Kevin Holden

    April 20, 2014

    Comparative Literature graduate student Kevin Holden has been awarded the prestigious Fence Modern Poets Prize for work completed while conducting research in...

  • Happy New Year

    January 2, 2014

    We’re delighted to welcome 2014 by celebrating some of the exciting research and new publications generated by the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and the Yale Collection of American Literature in 2013.

  • New Scholarship: Electric Affinities

    October 1, 2013

    Electric Affinities: Close Up and Queer Modernism by Mal Ahern Between 1927 and 1933, the poet H.D. assisted with the publication of the avant-garde film...

  • New Student Research

    June 3, 2013

    Eliana Kwartler, Yale College Class of 2017 written for Professor Richard Deming’s Spring 2013 English 127 Readings in American Literature “ ‘I...

  • Black Acts Creativity and Celebrity in Twentieth-Century Theater

    May 14, 2013

    Created by the students of “African American Theater” in the spring of 2013, this web exhibition was borne of a desire to explore different modes of writing, to make use of the amazing resources in black theater held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and to share those resources as a work of public scholarship.

  • New Student Research

    January 2, 2013

    Liana Epstein, Yale College Class of 2014 “The Great American Writers’ Cookbook” written for Professor Stuart’s Fall 2012 English 121 class: Writing...

  • Student Research in Beinecke Collections

    June 1, 2012

    Zara Kessler, Yale College Class of 2012 John Hersey’s Yale Education written for Professor John Gaddis, The Art of Biography, HIST215J An excerpt: On...
  • The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

    Student Research in Beinecke Collections

    May 25, 2012

    Katherine Fein, Yale College Class of 2014 Quite a Story to Tell: The Laughs and Loves of Mary Welsh written for Professor John Gaddis, The Art of Biography,...
  • Envelope addressed to Christian William Miller by artist Paul Cadmus

    Student Research in Beinecke Collections

    June 22, 2010

    Rachel Wilf, Yale Class of 2012 “Social Change through Science: Homosexual Activism Influencing the Kinsey Report” Following the startling success of his first...

  • Student Research in Beinecke Collections

    June 2, 2010

    David Suwondo’s essay on Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (written for Professor Jessica Pressman’s Spring 2010 English 127 class) draws on two items in the Jean Toomer Papers (JWJ MSS 1) at the Beinecke Library