LIBRARIES
Sterling Library
The majestic Sterling Library, completed in the 1930s, and with a collection of over four million volumes, is the center of the Yale library system. A fully-computerized catalog, an impressive list of online journals, air-conditioned stacks, and a gorgeous renovation of the main Reading Room and the Manuscripts and Archives Library are among the amenities offered by the library. For more details, please consult the extensive Library website (in particular, English Resources).
Beinecke Library
The Beinecke Library offers unparalleled opportunities for graduate students in English to carry out original research. Its collections of original editions, manuscripts, early newspapers, and the papers and correspondence of major writers, many of which have never been completely quarried, are a rich trove for future scholarship. The Beinecke has extraordinary holdings in both early and modern periods, with special depth in manuscripts relating to British, American, and African-American literature and art. Authors represented include: William Beckford, Sir John Betjeman, James Boswell, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Crane, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Edwards, George Eliot, George Gissing, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, John Masefield, George Meredith, Alexander Pope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, and Walt Whitman; artists include Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Steiglitz. The Beinecke houses a particularly important collection of materials relating to international Modernism, including the papers of Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy and Carl Van Vechten. And it was Van Vechten who founded the equally superb collection representing African-American writers and artists, featuring James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. The largest collection of manuscripts remains, probably, the Osborn collection, encompassing nearly every aspect of British literature and history from the reign of Richard II to that of Victoria.
The Beinecke also offers a series of Master Classes in specialized fields such as paleography, biography, or the history of the book, conducted by distinguished visiting scholars.
The Lewis Walpole Library
A leading non-circulating research library for English eighteenth-century studies, the library contains 35,000 volumes, whose centerpiece is Horace Walpole’s own antiquarian library. The collection includes pamphlets and tracts documenting the history of Walpole’s times, and of plays of the period, in a comprehensive set known as The Theatre of George the 3d. The Library houses the most extensive collection of English eighteenth-century satirical prints in the United States, with highly detailed indices.
The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library
The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at 180 York Street comprises the merged holdings of the former Art & Architecture and Drama Libraries, the Arts of the Book Collection, and the staff of the Visual Resources Collection, making it the primary collection for the study of art, architecture, and drama production at Yale. Currently, the drama collections have approximately 20,000 volumes, including plays by American, British, and international playwrights, books on the history of theatre, theatre architecture, dramatic criticism, costume and stage design, stage lighting and production, theatre management, biographies and related reference books. Non-book materials from the former Drama Library that document theatrical production through photographic prints, production books, scrapbooks, and ephemera are now part of the Arts Library Special Collections department. Highlights include the Rollo Peters Archive, the Rockefeller Theatrical Prints Collection, the Doolittle Collection of Japanese Theatre Prints, and the George Pierce Baker Collection. Yale School of Drama students are free to use the collections in the libraries of other graduate professional schools, the Sterling Memorial Library, the Bass Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Lillian Goldman Law Library
The Lillian Goldman Law Library is located within the heart of the Yale Law School complex, providing the Law School community with ready access to one of the world’s finest collections of printed legal materials. These collections are complemented by access to a growing array of online sources, as well as the strong interdisciplinary collections housed nearby at more than twenty-five other campus libraries, including the Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A major goal of the Law School’s library is to support the needs of twenty-first-century legal researchers by integrating access to print and online sources throughout the library.
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
The Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library strives to be a center of excellence that develops and sustains services and resources to support the biomedical, health, and public health care information needs of Yale University and the Yale-New Haven Medical Center.
CENTERS and MUSEUMS
The McDougal Center
The McDougal Center in the Hall of Graduate Studies houses a number of facilities for graduate students–a library and a reading room, computer facilities, the Blue Dog Café, a children’s play area and family resource room, meeting rooms, and lounges. McDougal Fellows–members of a graduate student administrative group–help oversee programs and activities from their offices in the Center.
The Whitney Humanities Center
The Whitney Humanities Center is an interdisciplinary institution that reflects Yale University’s longstanding commitment to the humanities. The Whitney promotes research and scholarly exchange across fields and is especially committed to supporting the activities of faculty and students whose work transcends departmental boundaries.
Beyond this, the Whitney hosts a wide array of events, from international symposia and lectures that bring prominent visitors to the university, to small “working groups” that meet regularly for a free and informal exchange of ideas among faculty and students on topics of more than disciplinary interest.
The Yale Center for British Art
Housing the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, this museum was founded when Yale graduate Paul Mellon bequeathed his extraordinary collection of British art to the university, and funded the handsome modern building that contains it. Both the reference room of the library, and the Rare Book and Print Room, offer graduate students in English opportunities for interdisciplinary work involving the visual arts.
The Yale University Art Gallery
Graduate Research Assistantships (GRA) at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art are designed to provide Yale University doctoral students, in their second through sixth year, the opportunity to work as part of an intellectual team on a major scholarly project at one of the museums. These research positions enhance the educational experiences provided by academic course work and teaching assistantships at the University, allowing students to extend their range of academic specializations and expertise, and to augment research skills by direct contact with objects in the collections.
The Gallery also offers a number of scholarly lectures, workshops, and symposia each year. They are eager to develop and coordinate this programming in conjunction with courses being taught across the University and welcome discussions of upcoming course schedules, departmental colloquia or symposia, research emphases, or other points of potential overlap.
The Elizabethan Club
The Elizabethan Club contains about 300 volumes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, including the first four Shakespeare folios, the Huth Shakespeare quartos, and first or early quartos of all the major dramatists. The books may be brought to the Beinecke Library.