Current Research

We are always eager to help spread the word about new scholarship from our collections and we frequently post notices about books, articles, and conference presentations that have benefited from research in our reading room or using our online resources.

Students, scholars, and fellows are invited and encouraged to let us know about new work drawn from the Beinecke Library’s collections.  Please send a citation, summary, and information about Beinecke collections consulted by following this link: New Scholarship from Beinecke: Submissions.

New Scholarship

  • Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies

    August 11, 2022

    Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies By Allison Bensinger August 11, 2022 Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with LinkedIn Share this with Email Print this A selection of books by Black authors (Photo by Tubyez Cropper) Yale’s Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill of Rutgers University recently received a $1.7 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to support the development of The Black Bibliography Project (BBP), an initiative that aims to revive and transform descriptive bibliography for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies.

  • Interlaced geometric designs surrounding red and black text in the Syriac script.

    Hidden Gems

    April 18, 2022

    Hidden Gems Welcome to Hidden Gems , a series of short articles which highlight items in the Beinecke Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts and...

  • “Tough but a lot of fun” ... new biography of Florine Stettheimer (AGO Insider)

    March 16, 2022

    I was at Beinecke Library reading letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and found one addressed to someone named Florine Stettheimer describing a funny incident with O'Keeffe's husband, Alfred Stieglitz, falling down in the bathroom. So I went to investigate who Stettheimer was and saw that Beinecke owned five of her paintings and also had her diaries and letters. I fell in love with the paintings which are funny and witty and no one had done a full exhibition of her work since Marcel Duchamp organized her Retrospective at MOMA in 1946. I decided to make her the topic of my Ph.D. which was published by Yale University Press.

  • An image of a manuscript page with illuminated and rubricated initials and black text.

    Osborn fa38: An Early Copy of Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica

    January 18, 2022

    Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica, composed in Latin and completed in Paris in the 1170s, was one of the key texts for historical and scriptural education among schoolmen throughout the Middle Ages. The Beinecke Library is fortunate to possess an early copy of this important medieval text: Osborn fa38, which was produced in England at the priory of Rochester Cathedral.

  • Meet the FAS Faculty: Anna Zayaruznaya

    November 30, 2021

    What can music teach us about the past and about ourselves? Music historian Anna Zayaruznaya challenges students to “attend carefully” to things that sound strange.

  • New Scholarship: Lukas Moe on George Oppen

    November 15, 2021

    Moe, Lukas. ““Not anyone’s Eden”: A Critical Introduction to New Poems by George Oppen.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 43 no. 4, 2020, p. 18-44. From the...
  • A manuscript diagram of the Greek letter delta labelled with Arabic text in red.

    Beinecke Coptic MS 13

    October 1, 2021

    Beinecke Coptic MS 13: The Book of the Coptic Language The Treatise on the Mystery of Letters is a tractate attributed to Apa Seba (supposedly Sabbas the...