HUMS 491: The Senior Essay

The Humanities Major was conceived six decades ago as a hothouse for Yale College students of exceptional promise. To disciplined, self-motivated learners seeking immersion in Western history, ideas, literature and art, Humanities offers an unmatched blend of breadth and intensity, of flexibility and focus. Now as ever, the goal is to foster wide and cultured expertise in those whose interests and abilities range across traditional disciplinary lines. This means that the Humanities Major is charged to instill breadth and depth of knowledge simultaneously.

While the open curriculum invites wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study, other aspects of the program ensure that students develop demonstrable expertise in concrete areas. In the final year, this mix of flexibility and rigor yields tangible fruit in the Senior Essay, which is required of all students in the Major.

The Senior Essay in Humanities is a substantial scholarly work that reflects the author’s personal concerns, talents, and interests. It is also a serious work of intellectual argument and communication. A successful Senior Essay not only sets the author’s erudition and passion on display, but also makes a genuine contribution to the wider community of learning.

Most Humanities students experience the Senior Essay as a source of simultaneous excitement and anxiety. That is as it should be. The Senior Essay is at once an end and a beginning. It is both the culmination of one’s own choices and achievements as a student and one’s debut as a serious scholar. It is both deeply personal and deeply public. And for the overwhelming mass of graduates, the Essay is, in hindsight, a source of immense pride.

For students currently in the Major, this guide aims to maximize the excitement and eventual pride that the Senior Essay process induces, and to minimize the anxiety. We have sought to do this by assembling all of the information and advice we have about the Senior Essay into a single accessible document. For advisors, we have tried to make the entire process as transparent as possible. The pages that follow collate calendars of the relevant deadlines with guidelines for the document itself, narrative accounts of the various stages in the Senior Essay process, and examples of notable past essays. We hope that this information allays many of the concerns you may have. Questions not addressed here may be forwarded directly to the DUS at paul.grimstad@yale.edu. The Senior Essay in the Humanities is a project that commonly occasions both deep discoveries and lasting self-discoveries. We wish you the very best of both!

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 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.

The formal requirements for the prospectus are detailed in section (C) of the “Requirements and Guidelines” above. 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.

The Senior Essay prospectus is a statement of intent. It is submitted several months before the final version of the Essay in question is complete. 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.

One (1) electronic copy of the signed prospectus must be submitted to the DUS by email at paul.grimstad@yale.edu.

Depending on which schedule you are following, your prospectus and draft deadlines will be separated by four, six, or eleven months (see “Calendar” above for details). 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. We normally recommend 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.

Think early and often about the calendar, especially if you are writing a one-term essay in Spring. In that case, you will have four months to work with between the prospectus deadline and the draft deadline. Familiarize yourself with the landscape of the Yale calendar between these dates. 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, no matter how busy you are with your other coursework. Even if you will have time during Winter or Spring Break to work on your draft, do not try to tackle the whole project then. Slow but steady wins this race.

The formal requirements for the draft are detailed in section (B) of the “Requirements and Guidelines” above. Please note that you are not graded on the draft. It is a wake-up moment for you, and a troubleshooting moment for your advisor and Humanities staff.

Time will be tight between your submission of the draft and the final due date. Make the most of it! These final 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 formal requirements for the final version of the Senior Essay are detailed in section (A) of the “Requirements and Guidelines” above, with submission instructions at §8. Once again, the final Senior Essay deadlines for 2024-2025 are noon on Monday, November 27, 2024, for One- Term Essays in Fall 2024, and noon on Friday, April 5, 2025, for Full-Year Essays and One- Term Essays in Spring 2025.

If a Senior Essay is late, it is assessed a grade penalty and becomes ineligible for departmental and Yale College prizes. What is more, the author becomes ineligible for distinction in the major.

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.