In association with GALA (the Yale Gay and Lesbian Alumni/ae Association), LGBT Studies awards an annual GALA Senior Essay Prize. Any senior essay or senior project, submitted to any department or program in Yale College, is eligible if it addresses a topic relevant to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. Essays or projects can be submitted through the online GALA Senior Essay Prize Application. Student’s name, address, phone number, UPI #, major(s), advisor(s), and residential college are required. Please submit the essay saved as a PDF. Submissions are due no later than Friday, April 17, 2020.
Recent GALA Prize Winners:
2018 Anonymous, “ ‘At His Majesty’s Pleasure’ ”: The 1906 Bucknill Inquiry and the Global Fates Of Chinese Labor”
2017 Isabel Cruz, “Visibility & Violence: The Social and Legal Impacts of Argentina’s Transgender Rights Law”
2016 Sarah Giovanniello, “Marching Sideways: Queering Adolescence in Nadezhda Durova’s The Cavalry Maiden”
and Eliana Kwartler, “The Marked Body of Christ: Constructing a Queer Religion in the AIDS-Era Works of David Wojnarowicz and Ron Athey”
2015 Jason Cyrus Mazella, “Queer Civil Society in Contemporary China: Understanding Variation in Success Across Gay and Lesbian Organizations”
and Christopher John Mulvey, “Male Bodybuilding: Theorizing the Hyperbuilt Body”
2014
Gabriel Murchison, “Clinics, Cancer, and Children: Lesbian Health in the U.S. AIDS Crisis”
2013
Rachel Looff, “The ‘Dykes’ Chapter: Response to ‘In Amerika They Call Us Dykes’ as a Representation of Lesbian Participation in the 1970s US Women’s Health Movement”
2012
Joan Gass , “Queer Colonialism? International LGBT Funding in Bangalore, India”
Gabriel Seidman, Title withheld by request
2010
Bradley K. Milam, “Gay West Virginia: Community Formation and the Forging of a Gay Appalachian Identity, 1963-1979”
2009
Kathryn Himmelstein, “Scared Straight: Institutional Sanctions against LGBTQ Youth”
Anna Wipfler, “The Making of ‘the Gay Ivy’: A History of Lesbian and Gay Student Organizing at Yale, 1969-1987”
2008
Michael Nedelman, for his film “Everyone Who Has Ever Lived Here”
2007
Matthew Busick, “Becoming a Yale Man: Intimacy among Yale Students in the Nineteenth Century”
Robin Pearce, “A House Divided: The Shifting Identity of the Black Church Navigated through the Discourse of the Lives of Men Who Have Sex with Other Men”