April 29 – Oct. 6, 2024
Curated by AJ Laird Yale College '24
For nearly two centuries, the ports of New England were home to the “Yankee” whaling industry. The industry operated from ports such as Nantucket, New Bedford, Mystic, and New Haven. The exhibit centers on the Sterling Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Whaling Logs Collection. Logbooks were essential navigational tools, allowing the captain to consistently track the ship’s position in terms of latitude of longitude. These logbooks also contain extensive documentation of whaling voyages and reveal the complex world of the industry.
Logbooks served another function beyond in-the-moment navigation: The whaling industry played a central role in colonial knowledge extraction, and the encroachment of the US into the Pacific world during the nineteenth century. Logbooks were tools for gathering information –Logbook data was used to construct ocean charts and make sense of the broader climate patterns and wind systems governing the movement of ships through the ocean.
Journals, private letters, crew lists and ships’ contracts illuminate the lived experience of working in the industry. Onboard the ships, crew labored to transform whale blubber and bone into marketable commodities. Onshore, the whaling life caught the imagination of the US public, and whalers’ artworks and writings became another commodity of the whaling industry.
Oct. 16, 2023 – April 21, 2024
Curated by Simone Felton Yale College '25
“City Rewritten: The Oak Street Connector and Urban Renewal in New Haven” explores the effects of the formative era of urban renewal on New Haven’s urban landscape and social history. Urban renewal was a progressive vision aimed at revitalizing a city’s economy, beautifying the urban landscape, removing residents from substandard living conditions, and promoting racial integration. However, historians and urban planners have largely viewed the policy as a failure, one that disproportionately displaced impoverished Black people and reinforced patterns of segregation.
From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, New Haven embarked on a particularly ambitious urban renewal program that completely remade the city’s downtown and affected most of its poorer neighborhoods. Diving into Yale special collections from New Haven city government as well as community organizations and oral histories, this exhibit explores New Haven’s very first urban renewal project—the Oak Street Connector—as a case study for urban renewal’s utopian vision, its complex politics surrounding civic representation, and its destructive impact on New Haven residents.
Oct. 16, 2023 – April 21, 2024
Curated by Hannah Oblak Yale College '24
“Anne Boleyn: Life and Legend” explores the extraordinary figure of Anne Boleyn (1501 or 1507?–1536) as well as the dramatic and changing world she lived in. Her story has captivated audiences from the contemporary Tudor court of 1536 to the twenty-first century.
Anne was an influential and modern woman, navigating the constraints of a patriarchal society to find agency. Anne and Henry VIII’s (1491–1547) affair led him to break from Catholicism and establish the Church of England. Anne married Henry and was crowned Queen in 1533. Their marriage would produce a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). Yet only three years later, Anne would be accused of adultery, imprisoned, and beheaded. “ Anne Boleyn: Life and Legend” hopes to center Anne in her own narrative
and to explore the relationship between gender and power in the Tudor era.
“Anne Boleyn: Life and Legend” hopes to understand the dichotomy between the historical figure of Anne Boleyn and the mythological Anne of art, literature, and film. The first part of the exhibit explores her life and world, while the second half traces Anne’s legacy in popular memory. The project incorporates materials from the Yale University Library collections, including the Lewis Walpole Library, the Haas Family Arts Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Film Archive, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and additionally the National Portrait Gallery, London.
May 1 - October 8, 2023
Curated by Chucho Padres Martinez Yale College '23
The 1962 book “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things” radically altered how we now think about the history of art. Studying and traveling through Latin America, the author George Kubler (1912–1996) developed a methodology that would expand the scope of art history—moving it away from the study of great works of art and biographies of makers toward a consideration of every intentionally made object. Kubler contested the rigid categorization of objects based solely on temporal and spatial origins, a superficial practice that obscures the true history of how things came to be.
Kubler studied and worked at Yale University for more than 50 years. His presence is felt across the institution—from the neo-Gothic library that houses this exhibition to the Olsen
Collection of ancient American art at Yale University Art Gallery.
This exhibition is a collage of Kubler’s archival materials in the special collections of Yale Library. It explores the genesis of Kubler’s inquiries, the context that enabled his work, his cross-influences with contemporaries, the methodologies that he envisioned and those he contested, and, finally, the highly influential book The Shape of Time, which ties all his work together.
November 7, 2022 – April 23, 2023
Curated by Liam Hannigan Yale College '25, Jennifer Le Yale College '25, Whitney Toutenhoofd Yale College '25 for the Student Research at Yale Library exhibition
Matters of Color/Color Matters draws on a course offered in Yale's Department of the History of Art in fall 2021, which explored color in various disciplines and applications. Two questions emerged: What is color? Is color just color? The exhibition’s concept—"matters of color" versus "color matters"—distinguishes the technical from the conceptual.
The section “Matters of Color” addresses how color can be explained objectively. Yale Library’s special collections house scientific texts and models that illustrate the history and development of color theory. These objects— from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Haas Family Arts Library, and the Medical Historical Library of Cushing/Whitney Medical Library—address the technical aspects of color as a foundation for the application of color theory in a wide range of contexts, including medicine and astronomy.
“Color Matters” investigates meanings derived through color. Personal experiences and biases often influence interpretation. Black/white/red/yellow labels may evoke preconceived notions of race. The color orange may evoke childhood memories or signify a political figure. Blue may suggest divinity, holiness, and purity. This section draws on symbolic, interpretive, and expressive uses of color in the collections of Yale Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.
March 2 - September 30, 2022
Curated by Gabby Colangelo Yale College ’22 for the Yale Library Senior Exhibit Fellowship
Libraries are sites of self-discovery. Many coming out stories feature accounts of individuals finding queerness for the first time while reading. At the same time, libraries are not apolitical spaces: homophobic and outdated library classification practices have made “lesbian” a difficult subject to research and find. As of early February, out of the ten million items recorded in Yale Library’s database Orbis, only 1068 are catalogued under the subject heading “lesbian.”
We are Everywhere explores the relationship between lesbians, archives, and lesbian objects in archives. Beginning in the archives of the Harlem Renaissance and ending in the archives of the AIDS crisis, this exhibition asks the question: What does it mean to catalog an object as “lesbian” –or to not? In particular, the exhibition highlights moments where lesbians deliberately introduce themselves into the mainstream historical record with younger generations in mind: creating their own archives so, as Lisbet Tellefsen said, young lesbians of the future ““trying to organize and do work will have it a little easier.” The objects in this show are a small sample of the material traces left by our vast, continually discovered queer history. We are everywhere. We write, we love, we care, we see. We name ourselves.
This project builds on an English Department senior essay and highlights materials from across Yale Library Collections, such as the Lisbet Tellefsen papers at Beinecke Library and the Lesbian and gay liberation collection at Yale Manuscripts and Archives.
December 4, 2021 - April 24, 2022
Curated by Kathryn Schmechel '21 for the 2021 Senior Essay Exhibition
“Free the New Haven Panthers” explores the roles of the Black Panthers and Yale in creating a successful protest movement, representing the varying positions and perspectives that Yale affiliates and Black Panther organizers brought to the table in their disparate but related fights for justice and fairness. The exhibition serves as an attempt to grapple with just a small selection of critical archival holdings at Yale, in order to give some sense of what the Black Power movement involved, what May Day constituted, and what happened after the arrest of those known as the “New Haven Nine." Fifty-one years later, the events surrounding May Day 1970 still feel relevant, especially in the aftermath of last summer’s global protests for racial justice after the horrific murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many other Black Americans. Much work remains to be done, but the curator hopes that looking at the May Day Rally in a new light can be a part of this critical work.
Curated by Emma Brodey '21 for the 2020 Student Research at YUL Exhibition
Publication & Prejudice brings together more than twenty versions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice based in the Yale collections. Every one of these books tells more or less the same story. The volumes, however, encompass a plethora of formats, editions, and re-imaginings. Some reinvent Austen’s text in bold and modern ways. Others use the tools of printing and publication to make claims about the original text itself. Even when they contain exactly the same words, many small choices by publishers combine to create a completely different reading experience. This exhibition tells a visual story of how a book can be changed by its publishers, and by its readers.
Watch a video interview with Emma to learn more about her course paper that inspired this exhibit, her curation process, and the versions of Pride and Prejudice that she included from the Yale collections.
Curated by Sarah Adams '20 for the 2020 Student Research at YUL Exhibition
"Jappalachia": Connections Between the Appalachian Trail and Japan’s Shinetsu Trail explores how the concept of a “long trail” has traveled through the world and evolved in changing relationships to the environment. The Shinetsu Trail and Appalachian Trail are both nationally funded long-distance trails established during times of increasing industrialization. This exhibit explores how social and environmental changes that followed in the areas helped spur the development of a long trail. Though the connections may be surprising, the relationships between the two trails reveal the manifold purposes and unique aspects of the places they serve.
Watch a video interview with Sarah to learn more about her research process using Yale University Library collections, her work with her collaborators, and the development of her thesis into an exhibit.
Curated by Julia Carabatsos '20 for the 2020 Senior Essay Exhibition
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is best known today for her fiction, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920). Yet she also had a keen interest in architecture and interior design. Her first full-length publication was an interior design treatise The Decoration of Houses (1897) and she directed the design of many of her homes during her life. Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room brings together both aspects of Wharton’s career. It explores the rules she defined in The Decoration of Houses and their application in her own homes, alongside her attention to design details in the handwritten manuscript of The Age of Innocence. This exhibit focuses on Wharton’s treatment of the drawing room, which provides a particularly rich context for understanding Wharton’s elite New York City society at the turn of the 20th century and the role of women within it.
Watch a video interview with Julia to learn more about her curation process and the Senior Essay that inspired this exhibition.
October 10, 2019 - April 4, 2020
In conjunction with the 50 Women at Yale 150 campus-wide celebration, two Yale College seniors have curated side-by-side exhibits on two different aspects of women at Yale using materials from library collections.
Intimate Spaces and Gender: Fifty Years of Housing Policy at Yale curated by Valentina Connell '20
Valentina Connell’s exhibit looks at the evolution of housing policy and residential life in Yale College over the past fifty years, since the first undergraduate women were admitted in 1969. Based on research in the library’s Manuscripts and Archives Department, the exhibit shows that residential life was one of the most difficult aspects of gender integration. Residences were overcrowded, and the first women undergraduates, still a small minority on campus, felt isolated.
Yale-Aided Design: The Work of Female Architecture Graduates curated by Mariana Melin-Corcoran '20
Mariana Melin-Corcoran’s exhibit explores the history of women’s involvement in the Yale School of Architecture. The Yale School of Fine Arts enrolled women students from its opening in 1869, but restricted them to more traditional courses of sculpture and painting. When the Department of Architecture was inaugurated in 1916 and until the late 1940s and early 1950s, only men were allowed to enroll. Among the first women architecture graduates were Leona Anneberg Nalle (M.Arch 1956) and Estelle Margolis (B.Arch. 1955). In 2016, the School of Architecture appointed its first female leader, Dean Deborah Berke.
May 13 - October 6, 2019 | Curator: Eve Sneider '19
In the 1960s and 70s, American magazines like The New Yorker became incubators for a new kind of journalism—coined “New Journalism” by one of its progenitors, Tom Wolfe—which employed literary devices typically found in fiction to tell the stories of real people. “New Journalism” and its leading writers had a lasting impact on how journalists and others wrote compelling and readable nonfiction. Janet Malcolm entered the writing world in the late 1950s, just as the definition of journalistic writing was beginning to undergo a rapid transformation. Born Jana Wienerova in Prague in 1934, the daughter of a lawyer and a psychiatrist, she immigrated to the United States as a little girl. Here, she would earn a degree from the University of Michigan and rise to the uppermost echelon of the New York literary world, penning articles for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. As her work evolved through the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, it emerged at the fore of reimagining what journalism could look like.
The Courtroom, the Couch, and the Archive examines Malcolm’s engagement with three of the central spaces her works took place in—the lawyer’s courtroom, the psychoanalyst’s couch, and the biographer’s archive. Ultimately, the time Malcolm spent in these spaces would have a dramatic impact on how she told her own story. This exhibition draws from the Janet Malcolm papers at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, as well as other Beinecke and Manuscripts and Archives collections, to illuminate how she pieced together the stories of others and, eventually, of herself
May 10 - October 12, 2018 Curator: Christopher Malley, Yale College ’18
On December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck collided with four Palestinians waiting to re-enter the Jabalia refugee camp as they returned from work in Israel. Their deaths ignited the First Intifada (1987–1993), a grassroots uprising against the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Ordinary Palestinians led demonstrations, went on strike, and boycotted Israeli goods. Young people equipped only with stones and slingshots confronted heavily armed Israeli soldiers.
This exhibition presents political posters and photographs drawn chiefly from the Palestinian Liberation Movement Collection (MS 1701) in Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. On display here for the first time, they reflect the organization’s political stances and indicate many of the symbolic and everyday strategies of the First Intifada.
The exhibition is curated by Christopher Malley, Yale College ’18, and is based upon his senior essay in history, “Posters, Leaflets, and Stones: A Cultural History of the First Intifada.”
October 19, 2018 - May 4, 2019
Curators: Amy DePoy, Geeta Rao, Leland Stange, Zachary Lee Nazar Stewart
This annual exhibit in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor highlights four Yale students' exceptional research at the Yale University Library. The subjects represented are as diverse as the Yale Library collections and convey a combination of both complete and ongoing research.
The four student curators and their exhibit topics are:
• “Blanche Knopf: Publishing the Harlem Renaissance,” curated by Amy DePoy ’19
• “Femininity, Feminism, and the Fight Over Smoking: How Virginia Slims and the American Cancer Society Captured the Attention of Twentieth-Century Women,” curated by Geeta Rao ’19
• “Democracy at Yale: Tracing the Paper Trails of the Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts,” curated by Leland Stange ’19
• “Looking Closely: The Life and Afterlife of Beinecke Manuscript 481.101,” curated by Zachary Lee Nazar Stewart, doctoral student, Graduate School of Arts and Science
May 15 - October 6, 2017 | Curator: Olivia Armandroff ‘17, Berkeley College
Bookplates, marks of ownership that have existed for centuries, acquired a new life outside the covers of books in their golden age. At this turn-of-the-twentieth-century moment, bookplates were prized for their aesthetic value, and it became an international phenomenon to collect, study, and exchange them. This accompanied improvements to printing technologies that made books and their bookplates more affordable for the aspiring and rising middle class. From his home on New Haven’s Whitney Avenue, William Fowler Hopson catered to a growing marketplace that sought out individualized, personal bookplates. Hopson’s process realizing his 201 bookplate commissions—preserved in correspondence, sketches, and corrected trial proofs—demonstrates his commitment to encapsulating his patrons’ identities. This exhibition features Hopson’s artistic materials and personal papers, part of the Yale Bookplate Collection and Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, to elucidate the process of inventing, negotiating, and printing bookplate designs in their golden age. Ultimately, Hopson’s clients commissioned bookplates with artistic representations that were emblematic of their familial, personal, and communal contributions. By tracing the claims made through these commissions, we gain unique insight into some of the social standards and aspirations at the turn of the twentieth century in America.
Monday, October 16, 2017 - Friday, May 4, 2018
Curators: Jun Yan Chua, Sarah Holder, Daphne Martin, Eve Romm
This annual exhibit in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor highlights four Yale students' exceptional research at the Yale University Library. The subjects represented are as diverse as the Yale Library collections and convey a combination of both complete and ongoing research.
The four student curators and their exhibit topics are:
October 3, 2016 - April 28, 2017 | Curators: María de las Mercedes Martínez-Milantchí ’16, Trumbull College,Archaelogical Studies; Camille Owens, Graduate Student, Dept of African American Studies; Helen Price ’18, Davenport College; Rebecca Straub, Graduate Student, Dept of the History of Art.
This annual exhibit in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor highlights four Yale students' exceptional research at the Yale University Library. The subjects represented are as diverse as the Yale Library collections and convey a combination of both complete and ongoing research. Students share key library resources important to their research ranging from online databases to favorite study spaces.
May 6, 2016 - September 22, 2016 | Curator: Stephanie Tomasson ’16
In the spring of 1954, amid the Cold War paradox between nuclear threat and suburban bliss, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee led a crusade against crime and horror comic books. These ten-cent “manuals for crime” were seen as aggravators of the growing problem of juvenile delinquency. Senators, Sinners and Supermen draws from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Special Collections at the Yale Divinity School Library, Sterling Memorial Library, and Manuscripts and Archives, and it explores the comic book scare and its lasting legacy. This exhibit emerged from Stephanie Tomasson's (Yale Class of 2016) senior essay for the history department. Tomasson conducted archival research across all of Yale’s collections and in the Estes Kefauver Papers at the Modern Political Archives of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
January 25 - April 30, 2016 | Curators: John D'Amico, East Asian Studies, Pierson College '16; Eve Houghton, English, Davenport College '17; Mary Jones, Music, PhD Candidate Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; David McCullough, American Studies, Davenport College '17.
This annual exhibit in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor highlights four Yale students' exceptional research at the Yale University Library. The subjects represented are as diverse as the Yale Library collections and convey a combination of both complete and ongoing research. Students share key library resources important to their research ranging from online databases to favorite study spaces.
April 2015 - January 2016 | Curators: Andrew Cordova, History, Silliman College '15; Miranda Melcher, Political Science, Branford College '16; Scott Stern, American Studies, Branford College '15 and Caroline Sydney, Humanities, Silliman College '16.
This first annual exhibit in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor highlights four Yale students' exceptional research at the Yale University Library. The subjects represented are as diverse as the Yale Library collections and convey a combination of both complete and ongoing research. Students share key library resources important to their research ranging from online databases to favorite study spaces.
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