Class of 2026 graduates win library prizes for best senior essays

Each year, the library invites Yale College seniors to submit their senior essays for consideration to win one of three prizes for excellence: the Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award, the Diane Kaplan Memorial Prize, and the Yale Library Map Prize. The winners are selected by librarians or faculty members.

The prizewinners are each awarded a cash prize in the amount of $500 (honorable mention recipients receive $250), and all winners’ essays are published on EliScholar, Yale Library’s digital platform for scholarly publishing. As is the tradition, students receive their awards with their diplomas at their residential commencement ceremonies.

The library also stewards the funds for three American History prizes, selected by faculty members in the Department of History. 

The Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

The Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award recognizes students whose senior essays or capstone projects substantially draw on government information, including documents or data. Yale Library has been a designated federal depository library since 1859.

Due to the excellence of the submissions this year, two students were chosen as first-prize recipients of the 2026 Applebaum Award:

Kyle Guo, Pierson College, for the essay “Boundaries of Inequality: The Political Economy of Redlining and Modern Mortgage Credit.” Read Kyle Guo’s essay.

Amit Kamma, Pierson College, for the essay “Remaking Buford Highway: Immigration and the Struggle for Walkable Suburbia.” Read Amit Kamma’s essay.

The Diane Kaplan Memorial Prize

The Diane Kaplan Memorial Prize recognizes prizewinning students’ excellent use of research materials from the library’s diverse collections and also the high quality of their writing.

Three students received the Diane Kaplan prize this year:

Emi Glass, Pauli Murray College, for the essay “‘At the Yale Women’s Center, Some Women Aren’t Welcome’: Reproductive Activism, Defining Feminism, and Determining Belonging in Women’s Spaces at Yale in 1987.” Read Emi Glass’s essay.

Aden Gonzales, Timothy Dwight College, for the essay “‘The Black Student Union Speaks’: Rebellion and Its Response in New Haven Public Schools, 1967–1970.” Read Aden Gonzales’s essay.

Avery Maples, Pierson College, for the essay “Sacrifice and Survival: Encountering Colonialism and the Bounds of Christian Humanitarianism in the Cherokee Nation from 1819–1833.” Read Avery Maples’s essay.

The Library Map Prize

The Library Map Prize recognizes students whose senior essays or projects make use of one or more maps or charts in substantive ways. Students may either create the maps or refer to maps found online or in the library’s special collections.

This year the Map Prize was awarded to two first-prize winners:

Avi Patel, Benjamin Franklin College, for the essay “Green as Cure: The City Beautiful Movement and the Spatial Politics of Health, 1870–1950.” Read Avi Patel’s essay.

Jhansiddh Setthachayanon, Pauli Murray College, for the essay “Huburban America: New Haven and the Promise of Mobility.” Read Jhansiddh Setthachayanon’s essay.

The Department of History Prizes

The library also stewards the funds for three American History prizes, selected by faculty members in the Department of History. Six prizes were awarded for best senior essays.

The Walter McClintock Prize was awarded to Avery Maples, Pierson College, for the essay “Sacrifice and Survival: Encountering Colonialism and the Bounds of Christian Humanitarianism in the Cherokee Nation from 1819–1833” and to Makayla Suina, Morse College, for the essay “The Cochiti Dam and the Politics of Self-Determination: Cultural Transformation at Pueblo de Cochiti in the Twentieth Century.”

Pilar Bylnsky and Ershai Matambandzo, both of Jonathan Edwards College, received the Howard R. Lamar Prize. Bylnsky’s winning essay was titled “‘We Have Nothing to be Grateful For’: How Sex Workers Contested Reform and Lifestyle Conditions at the Social Evil Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, 1870–1874.” Matambandzo won the prize for the essay “Cowboy Capitalists: David Packard and the Rise of Silicon Valley & Modern Conservatism, 1939–1980.”

Claire Kleindorfer, Grace Hopper College, won the David M. Potter Prize for the essay “The Mississippi Delta Chinese, 1870–1970.” Noah Tirschwell, Saybrook College, won for the essay “Could it Happen Here? Rethinking American Jewish Exceptionalism After the Holocaust, 1945 to 1954.”

Read more about the three Library Prizes and other undergraduate student prizes. 

Learn more about choosing a topic for the senior essay in history.

—Deborah Cannarella