For these 12 seniors, graduation day celebrations included awards for best 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, and the prizes are funded by Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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 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 a student whose senior essay or capstone project substantially draws on national government information or intergovernmental organization (IGO) 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 received the 2025 Applebaum Award:

Caroline Chen, Silliman College, for the essay “Adopting America’s Future Citizens: The Children’s Bureau and the Plight of East Asian War Orphans, 1950–1969.” Read Caroline Chen’s essay.

Cormac M. Thorpe, Pierson College, for the essay “Language, Categorization, and Control: Examining Exclusion in Refugee Regimes Through the Shift From Muhājir to Lājiʾ.” Read Cormac Thorpe’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:

Kayva Jain, Pauli Murray College, for the essay “Confessions of a Failed Revolutionary Subject: Toi Derricotte and the Black Notebooks in the Archive.” Read Kayva Jain’s essay.

Lynn Q. Lee, Saybrook College, for the essay “From Clinic to Court: Feminist Organizing and the Fight for Birth Control in Griswold v. Connecticut.” Read Lynn Lee’s essay.

Carmen Lopez Villamil, Jonathan Edwards College, for the essay “Litigating Landlessness: The U.S. Department of the Interior and the First Circuit Court’s Appropriations of Self-Governance and Socialism in Puerto Rico, 1934–52.” Read Carmen Lopez Villamil’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 one first-prize winner and two honorable-prize recipients:

Madeline A. Gupta, Morse College, was awarded first prize for the essay “Indigenous Technology Futurisms: Reclaiming Mackinac Island in Virtual Reality.” Read Madeline Gupta’s essay.

The Honorable Mention recipients are:

Saskia Braden, Berkeley College, for the essay “Site Optimization for a Dual Crisis: Co-Prioritizing Carbon and Biodiversity to Improve Conservation Impact in Indonesia.” 

Grace R. Ellis, Benjamin Franklin College, for the essay “Revising the Nation: Tribal Sovereignty and the American History Textbook, 1929–2002.” Read Grace Ellis’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. Four prizes were awarded for best senior essays.

The Walter McClintock Prize was awarded to Grace Ellis, Benjamin Franklin College, for the essay “Revising the Nation: Tribal Sovereignty and the American History Textbook, 1929–2002” and to Mara Gutierrez, Pierson College, for “Small and Mighty: The Evolution of the Native Community at Yale.”

Clay Jamieson, Grace Hopper College, received the Howard R. Lamar Prize for the essay “Selling Sustained Yield: The Edward Hines Lumber Company’s Operations in Twentieth-Century Eastern Oregon.”

Sophia Kanga, Pauli Murray College, won the David M. Potter Prize for the essay “Perfect Bodies Under Perfect Control: Female Circus Aerialists and the American Physical Culture Movement, 1880–1931.”

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

—Deborah Cannarella