Graduate Program
Research Resources
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 on-line journals, air-conditioned stacks, and a gorgeous renovation of the main Reading Room and the Manuscripts and Archives Library are among the achievements of the last five years. 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 graduate research. Authors represented include: William Beckford, Sir John Betjeman, James Boswell, Joseph Conrad, Walter Crane, Charles Dickins, Jonathan Edwards, George Eliot, George Gissing, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, John Masefield, George Meredith, John Ruskin, and Robert Louis Stevenson. 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 English literature and history from the reign of Mary Tudor 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 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 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 Elizabethan Club
The 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.
