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 2013
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
Essays from 2009
Essays from 2008
Hiram Bingham’s Expedition and the Peruvian Response: A Connecticut Yanqui in the Land of the Incas, Aaron Wiener
Essays from 2007
Becoming a Yale Man: Intimacy among Yale Students in the Nineteenth Century, Matthew Busick
Essays from 2005
Surviving the Death of God: Existentialism, God, and Man at Post-WWII Yale, Robert Tice Lalka