GALA Senior Essay Prize

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

The deadline for submission for spring 2024 is April 14th.


GALA Senior Essay Prize Recipients

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

Abigail Leonard Bridging the Divide: Revealing the Carceral/Military Continuum in the Stories of Abu Ghraib and Dee Deidre Farmer

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