The Yale Library offers the Diane Kaplan Memorial Senior Essay Prize. Each year up to three undergraduate student prizes are awarded in memory of our colleague Diane E. Kaplan, who was instrumental in making these prizes available to Yale College seniors. The prizes are for an outstanding senior essay, on any topic, based substantially on research done in one or more of the Yale Library's special collections, which includes: Arts Library Special Collections, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (including Manuscripts and Archives), Divinity Library Special Collections, Lewis Walpole Library, Medical Historical Library, Music Library Special Collections, and the Yale Film Archive.
For more information see the prize website.
Prize-winning essays from previous years are available below. Prior to 2022 this prize was given for significant use of the collections of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, only.
Essays from 2023
Sense-able Hauntings: Ethics and Narratives in Ornithological Specimen Preservation at Yale's Peabody Museum, Elaina Foley
Between Specificity and Myth: An Analysis of Carlos Mérida's 'Mexican Costume', Sofia Ortega-Guerrero
Essays from 2022
Paper Sons and Chosen Families: Blurry Archives and Non-Biological Kinship in the Chong Family Album, Sam Battles
“A Cascade of Shifts in the Brain”: Kay Ryan’s Poetics, Sarah Gannett
"The Language of Our Dreams": James Baldwin's Project of Identity Formation on Paper and Film, Madeleine W. Stern
Essays from 2021
Imperialism’s Stepchild: Dura-Europos and the Political Uses of Archaeology in the French Mandate of Syria, 1920–1939, Nathalie J. Bussemaker
Essays from 2020
The Apostle of Dissent: J. Hendrix McLane's Fight Against History in Post-Reconstruction South Carolina, Steven Rome
Ambassadors Extraordinary: Chester Bowles, B.K. Nehru, and Ambassadorial Agency in Indo-American Relations, 1961-1969, Sahaj Sankaran
Essays from 2019
Essays from 2018
From Paris to New Haven: Maurice Rotival and the Longue Durée of Urban Renewal, H. William Bernstein
Essays from 2017
Of a Healthy Constitution: Socialized Medicine Between the Triumphs of Social Security and Medicare, Sarah D. Kim
Doctors, Death, and Denial: The Origins of Hospice Care in 20th Century America, Sarah E. Pajka
Essays from 2016
The Roots of Radicalism: Natural Rights, Corporate Liberty, and Regional Factions in Colonial Connecticut, 1740-1766, Thomas Hopson
Internal Affairs: Untold Case Studies of World War I German Internment, Jacob L. Wasserman
Essays from 2015
The True University: Yale's Library from 1843 to 1931, Elizabeth D. James
Insurgent Labor Activists at Yale, 1968-1971, Raymond L. Noonan III
Essays from 2014
Measuring "Problems of Human Behavior": The Eugenic Origins of Yale's Institute of Psychology, 1921-1929, John Doyle
Essays from 2013
From Practical Woodsman to Professional Forester: Henry S. Graves and the Professionalization of Forestry in the United States, 1900-1920, Brendan D. Ross
Who Governed Yale? Kingman Brewster and Higher Education in the 1970s, Nathaniel Zelinsky
Essays from 2012
A Nowhere Between Two Somewheres: The Church Street South Project and Urban Renewal in New Haven, Emily Dominski
Essays from 2010
"Two Days By Plane": America's First Transcontinental Passenger Airline and the Selling of the Skies, Sean Fraga
The Buckley-Coffin Crusade: Preaching the Gospel of Political Ideology to Yale and America in the 1960s, Danielle Kehl