2018

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2016

2015

Student Research on the History of Women at Yale

The Courtroom, The Couch, and the Archive: Janet Malcolm’s Journalism

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

Taking up the Slingshot: Posters from the First Palestinian Intifada (1987–1993)

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.”

Student Research at Yale University Library

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

Constructing a Pictorial Identity: Bookplates in the Golden Age of Collecting

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.

Student Research at Yale University Library

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:

• Sociologist with a Conscience: Raymond Kennedy and the Making of the Global United States. Curated by Jun Yan Chua ’18, Saybrook College, History
• Housing/Houses/Home: A Visual History of Physical Space + Lived Experience in New Haven’s Oldest Public Housing. Curated by Sarah Holder ’17, Saybrook College, American Studies. 
• The Traveler’s Eye: Archaeological Wanderings in the Near East. Curated by Daphne Martin ’19, Morse College, Classics & History of Art 
• Dear Ones At Home”: An Archival Portrait of an American Family, 18571982. Curated by Eve Romm ’18, Ezra Stiles College, Literature

Student Research at Yale University Library

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.

Senators, Sinners, and Supermen

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.

Student Research at Yale University Library

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. 

Student Research at Yale University Library 

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.