About
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.
Deadline
Please submit nominations by April 18, 2025, 5:00pm.
GALA Senior Essay Prize Recipients
| 2025 |
Iz Klemmer “Ourselves as History-Makers:” the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the New York Public Library, and the Battle for Gay History, 1973-1995
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| 2024 | Jean Wang Kinships, Worldmaking, and a Genealogy of Possible Lives: An Existentialist Reading of Notes of a Crocodile |
| 2023 | Sasha Carney Xtra! Xtra! Circulating the Event in the Canadian “Gay Teen Suicide Crisis” |
| 2022 |
Farid Djamalov Temporal Drag: Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe’s Revolutions as a Queer Destabilizing Force in Post-Soviet Russia Journey Streams You had to be there: Spatial Marginality and Embodied Knowledge in the Queer Underground |
| 2021 | No entries/no prize issued |
| 2020 | Minh Vu “Apple Pies and Butch-Femmes: An Archival Recipe of Interethnic Solidarity During Japanese American Internment” |
| 2019 |
Elizabeth Karron “Kids First?”:Imagined Futures and Shifting Conceptions of Risk in Hepatitis B Immunization Policy in the United States, 1982-1999 Sam Leander American Radical Feminisms from 1970 to 1980: Lesbian Separatism, Trans Exclusion, and the Emergence of Trans Feminism |
| 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
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 Mazzella Queer Civil Society in Contemporary China: Understanding Variation in Success Across Gay and Lesbian Organizations Christopher 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” |
| 2011 | Gabriel Seidman - Title withheld by request |
| 2010 | Bradley 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” |
| 2006 | Loren Elise Krywanczyk
Quan Trinh |
| 2005 | Morgan Kate Richards |
| 2004 |
Daniel James Nugent Joshua Ryan Goodbaum |
| 2003 | Josie Rodberg |
| 2002 | Lara Marie Rios |
| 2001 | Patrick Brennan Gerard |
| 2000 | Jonathan Mallow |