Major Overview

Three broad surveys of foundational works of culture are required; 

• at least one must focus on works from the Western tradition; 
• another must examine non-Western works on their own terms.  
• One from any tradition with DUS approval

No more than one may focus on works by a single figure, e.g. a course on Plato’s dialogues, Du Fu’s poetry, or Duke Ellington’s songs.

The major requires two core seminars that model interdisciplinary conversation on questions of “interpretation” and “modernity”. Each seminar is taught by a pair of faculty members in the Humanities Program from complementary disciplines. The two broad themes remain consistent from year to year, but the content and instructors change.

Learn about the Core Seminars

One course is required in each subject area: 

1. Literature
2. Visual, musical, or dramatic arts
3. Humanities and the sciences
4. Intellectual history and historical analysis

Students select four additional elective courses to explore a chosen path of specialization in preparation for the senior essay. 

Selecting a Topic

Writing a Senior Essay takes months of energy and requires a deep personal investment in the project and its success. Take care at the outset to choose both a topic that you find compelling and a thesis that you are motivated to bring to your audience. Give yourself room to discover where your interests truly lie. Start hunting for a topic early in your junior year, so that you have time to try several possibilities on for size.

Be aware that not every topic is suitable for the Senior Essay. Your topic must be of interdisciplinary interest within (and perhaps beyond) the Humanities. It should be expansive and ambitious enough to appeal to a wide audience, but specific enough to invite a well-defined and original thesis. Lastly, it must be doable in a reasonable amount of time and number of pages.

If you having difficulty coming up with a suitable topic that is sufficiently compelling to you, one strategy we recommend is to go back through the syllabi of courses that you have especially enjoyed in the past. Look there for lists of “recommended,” “related,” or “additional” readings. Investigate those texts. There is reason to expect that they will lead you to topics that you will find of interest—just as your interest was held by the courses themselves.

Once you have a topic in mind, take it for a test-drive. Practice framing it as a prospectus to present to an advisor. Explain what questions you propose to answer, and how those questions and/or answers are in some sense new. Describe what methods you propose to use and defend your choice. Summarize the state of the relevant primary and secondary literature. Then ask yourself: can you do all of these things without losing touch with your initial enthusiasm? If you can, you are ready to proceed to the next stage: selecting an advisor.

Selecting an Advisor

You are responsible for finding an advisor to supervise your Senior Essay. This is best done early, ideally before the start of the semester in which you will submit your prospectus. If you wait to begin the search until after your senior year has begun, you may find yourself at a competitive disadvantage. That is because Humanities is an interdisciplinary program with faculty drawn from a variety of individual departments. By the start of the Fall semester, the faculty member of your choice may already be fully booked with senior advisees majoring in his or her particular discipline.

By contrast, those who begin the search early sometimes find themselves at a competitive advantage in angling for a potential advisor’s time. Humanities seniors have a good reputation: faculty know them to produce work of exceptional quality and interest. Our advice, therefore, is to start the search process as early as you can. Even if your first-choice faculty member declines to take you on as an advisee, do not hesitate to ask her or him for advice on other possibilities.

You are not restricted to the list of faculty associated with the program of Humanities. You are also welcome to choose an advisor who is an active instructor in the College or University with expertise in one of the humanities disciplines.

Please bear in mind, however, that compatibility of interest is not the only criterion you should consider (though it is a necessary one). Your advisor should be not only committed to and knowledgeable about your topic, but also frank in offering advice, supportive of your efforts, and committed to meeting with you on a regular schedule. If after several attempts you are still having difficulty identifying a faculty member who fits this bill, please consult the DUS.

The senior essay prospectus is a statement of intent. It is submitted long before the final version of the essay. It is to be expected that a student’s plan, main claim, and even topic may change substantially over the course of this period.

Nevertheless, it is important that there be a clear plan in place well in advance of the student’s enrollment in HUMS 491a or 491b. The purpose of the senior essay prospectus is to formalize such a plan. The prospectus has five required components:

1. a title that does justice to the student’s proposed topic;
2. a brief section (one to two paragraphs) summarizing the projected main claim of the proposed essay;
3. another brief section (one to two paragraphs) summarizing the projected methodology of the proposed essay;
4. a preliminary bibliography organized so as to distinguish clearly between works that the student has already consulted, and those that the student has yet to read; and
5. the signature of the student’s advisor.

The prospectus is an informal contract between three parties: you, your advisor, and the Program of Humanities. It formalizes (1) your intent to submit a senior essay with a certain thesis and a certain methodology on a certain topic, (2) your advisor’s readiness to vouch for you and supervise your work, and (3) the Humanities Program’s endorsement of the project. The prospectus is thus a product of—not a prequel to—negotiation among all three parties.

This means that, in the weeks leading up to the prospectus deadline, you should meet regularly with your advisor to iron out a plan that you can both agree on. It also means that you should make sure the DUS has an advance sense of what your proposed topic and thesis will be.

Do bear in mind that although you are required to submit an acceptable prospectus by the deadline—as that is one of the prerequisites for enrollment in HUMS 491a or 491b the following semester—your prospectus will not be assigned a grade. What is more, the prospectus leaves you wiggle room: your thesis, your methodology, and even your topic may evolve as you move from prospectus to draft. What is crucial is simply that your prospectus forecast a workable potential senior essay that would satisfy all three parties. This provides a chance to head off potential large-scale problems, and make course corrections, while there is still ample time to do so.

An electronic copy of the signed prospectus must be submitted to DUS  Paul Grimstad with a cc to Erin Townsend.

While the draft of your senior essay may be somewhat shorter than the minimum length for the final version, it must run through the entire argument of the essay. If the final version of the essay will include illustrations, copies of those illustrations should be submitted with the rough draft as well. The rough draft must be submitted electronically, via email to DUS Paul Grimstad, and to your essay advisor.

Depending on which schedule you are following, your prospectus and draft deadlines can be separated by a number of months. When you meet with your advisor in advance of the prospectus deadline, be sure to discuss how you intend to make use of this time and how often you intend to meet. It is normally recommended that you split it up into three roughly equal periods: one for research, one in which you start writing the draft and pursue additional research threads triggered by your writing, and one for completing the draft. If you and your advisor prefer a different scheme, that is fine. What is essential is that you and your advisor have a plan—and that your plan includes regular meetings, with clear expectations of the progress you expect to have made by the date of each meeting.

Familiarize yourself with the landscape of the Yale calendar during this time. Consider that you will be busy with Fall finals until mid-December and with your other Spring classes from mid-January until early March. Do you have travel or other activities planned for Winter or Spring Breaks? If so, it will be crucial for you to make regular, measurable progress on your essay during every week that you are on campus. Do not try to tackle the whole project over a Winter or Spring Break. Slow but steady wins this race.

The rough draft is not graded as such. However, failure to submit a draft by the deadline will jeopardize a student’s chance to do well on the essay itself—and will be taken into account by the DUS in his evaluation.

Final Revisions

Time will be tight between your submission of the draft and the final due date. Make the most of it! These weeks are the most intensive and valuable part of the senior essay process.

Leave room for careful rereading and last-minute changes, as well as for the inevitable printer jam, computer failure, and disk corruption. (On this note, bear in mind that computer-related disasters are not accepted as excuses for a late essay. We expect you to back up your files regularly, to be prepared to make use of campus computer labs and printers, and to leave extra time for troubleshooting.)

The senior essay in Humanities is a substantial work of interdisciplinary scholarship addressing questions of general interest to humanists. Every successful essay addresses a topic that is intrinsically interdisciplinary and of interest to a wide audience, argues for its main claims in a manner credible to scholars of the relevant research fields, and showcases the student’s own care and determination along the way.

Thirty (30) double-spaced pages in a standard 12-point font is the minimum length for the main text excluding the bibliography, appendices, and other notes of unusual length. There is no maximum length.

The content of the senior essay must reflect the author’s original research and writing. The topic need not be original, and some familiarity with and attention to existing secondary literature is expected. It is vital, however, that a senior essay in the Humanities not be overwhelmed by a review of existing scholarship. At the heart of every essay, the author is expected to strike out on his/her own in a manner that is both well-motivated and well-organized.

A full bibliography must accompany each senior essay. It must include both all sources cited in the essay itself and all sources consulted, but not cited, that have had more than a trivial influence on the author’s argumentation. Proper citation is expected, using any of the standards in common use in Yale humanities departments (MLA; Chicago style; APA). It is up to the individual student and his or her advisor to decide which citation standard is most appropriate. Both footnotes and endnotes are permitted, at the advisor’s discretion.

Within the main text itself, each senior essay must contain all of the following internal components:

1. a cogent main claim that is articulated prominently and concisely in the opening pages.
2. an introduction that attracts the general reader’s attention effectively, first to the overall topic, and then to the author’s main claim.
3. body paragraphs and/or sections that each make a single point well, so that the essay’s argument builds from one body paragraph and/or section to the next.
4. signposts—references to where the argument has come from, and where it is headed— to mark transitions from one body paragraph and/or section to the next.
5. a satisfying conclusion that both reprises the essay’s main claim and highlights the new, more informed perspective on the material that the essay has imparted to the reader.

While these internal components must all be present in the essay, they need not be explicitly marked. In general, it is up to the student and advisor to decide to what extent headings, subtitles, or other explicit marks of internal structure should be used in a particular essay.

The final version of the senior essay must be submitted to both your advisor and to DUS Paul Grimstad (cc Erin Townsend) as either a Word document or PDF, no later than noon on the due date.

Late submissions will be penalized with a lower grade on the essay. Students submitting late work will lose their eligibility for distinction in the Major.

Evaluation

Once you submit your senior essay, it is passed on for initial evaluation by both your advisor and a second reader selected by the DUS. The role of the second reader is to offer a dispassionate assessment of your essay based solely on its merits as a scholarly contribution to the humanities. In choosing a second reader, the DUS looks for an unbiased expert. This is a faculty member who (1) is knowledgeable about your topic, and (2) is not presumptively hostile to your methodology.

The evaluation process takes several weeks. Once your advisor and second reader have finished assessing your essay, both submit their recommendations to the DUS. The DUS then takes both sets of recommendations into account when assigning your essay its final grade and determining its eligibility for Yale College prizes. Be aware, therefore, that while your advisor and the second reader play important indirect roles in the grading of your senior essay, the DUS is the final arbiter.

Full Year Essay (Fall 2024 to Spring 2025)

Prospectus: Friday, 11/15/2024 at noon

Rough Draft: Friday, 03/07/2025 at noon

Final Essay: Friday, 04/04/2025 at noon

Full Year Essay (Spring 2025 to Fall 2025)

Prospectus: Friday, 11/15/2024 at noon

Rough Draft: Friday, 10/24/2025 at noon

Final Essay: Friday, 11/21/2025 at noon

One-Term Essay (Fall 2024)

Prospectus: Friday, 05/31/2024 at noon

Rough Draft: Friday, 10/25/2025 at noon

Final Essay: Friday, 11/22/2024 at noon

One-Term Essay (Spring 2025)

Prospectus: Friday, 11/15/2024 at noon

Rough Draft: Friday, 03/07/2025 at noon

Final Essay: Friday, 04/04/2025 at noon