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Model Papers

Professional writers often read works by other writers to think about new techniques. Although reading a good paper cannot teach you everything you need to know about writing in a given discipline, it can be enormously helpful. The papers below are past winners of the Poorvu Center Writing Contest. We hope you find some of these helpful for expanding your writing repertoire.

Consult the expandable headings below to view a more extensive list of downloadable model papers within the selected department or discipline.

“Yale’s Courtyards: Architectural Exclusion and Town-Gown Relations” by Elias Theodore ’27

“Commonwealth v. Sharpless and the Invention of American Obscenity” by River Sell ’25

“Occupy Wall Street: Creating a Successful Movement from a Chaotic Structure” by Kelsea Jeon ’20

“Treat the Problem, Not the Disease: The Necessary Shift from Vertical Programs to Horizontal Programs for Treating HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa” by Xiuqi Cao ’17

“’The Moral Meaning of a Pause’: Ethics Committees and the Cloning Debate” by Lindsay Gellman ’12

“Muahaha!: Defining Evil Laughter” by Spencer Katz ’13

“The Curiosity of Humanity” by Michael Rodriguez ’10

“The Opposition to Israel’s Withdrawal from the Gaza Strip: Legitimizing Civil Disobedience from Both Sides of the Political Map Name” by Aya Shoshan  ’10

“The Corrective Lens of Satire” by Benjamin Solarz ’09

“The Camera as Dictator: Photography and Fascism at Abu Ghraib” by Stephanie Lynch ’09

 

“A World Neither Marvelous Nor New: Aleksei Balabanov’s Of Freaks and Men as an Anti-Avant-Garde Film,” by Elise Lieberman ’22

“Entrepreneur, Democrat, Patriot: Sameness and Difference in Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum” by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen ’20

“Having Her Pie and Eating it Too: Sara Bareilles’ Representation of Women through the Convergence of Singer-Songwriter, Stage Character, and Composer in Waitress: The Musical,” by Sofía Campoamor ’20

“Avoiding the sublime: Photography and the ongoing legacy of nuclear technology” by Colin Hemez ’18

“Dancing with Knives: Voguing and Black Vernacular Dance” by Eliza Robertson ’18

“Walking With, Moving Through,” by Holly Taylor ’17.

“ ‘That’s What It Is’: Musical Potential and Stylistic Contrast in Act One, Scene One of The Most Happy Fella,” by Dan Rubins ’16.

“Ignoring the Call to Murder: The Evolution of Surrealist French Cinema by Christopher Adler ’09.

“The Role of Music, Women, and Wine at Symposia” by Hannah Rubin ’27

“Popular Protest in Early America: A Comparative Study of Shays’ and the Whiskey Rebellions” Veronica Zimmer ’25

“Whales, Oceans, Ships, and Colonial Power: The Workscape of Yankee Whaling” by AJ Laird ’24

“Thomas Clap, Ezra Stiles, and Yale’s First Revolution” by Thomas Hopson ’16

“Following Thread: Understanding History and Materiality in Frida Kahlo’s Clothes” by Deborah Monti ’19

“Privatization as Violence: Iraqi Oil and a Contractor Army” by Rosa Shapiro-Thompson ’19

“Managing History: The Federalist Attempt To Shape the Hartford Convention’s Legacy” by Nathaniel Zelinsky ’14

“The Ptolemies, the priesthood, and P. Grad. 4: The Impossibility of P. Grad. 4 in the Thebaid and Implications for Ptolemaic Rule” by Jennifer Barrows ’12

“The Samuel and Mary Attempted Piracy Outside the Port of Cephalonia: A Case Study of Piracy Law as a Transitional Factor Away from Lex Mercatoria” by Michael Gousgounis ’06

“Spivak, Austin, and the Verbalization of Self-Immolation in Frankenstein” by Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind ’24

“The Selfish Motif: Bridging Folklore and Evolutionary Theory with a Motif-Centered Approach” by Austin Theroux ’24

“Rising from the Ashes: Queer Theory and The Phoenix” by Simon Van Der Weide ’24

“Asking Her to Stay: A Close Reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Shampoo’ ” by Simon Billings ‘23

“Obscuring Gender into Oneness: in Canto 21 of ‘Song of Myself’ ” by Minh Vu ’20

“When Hell Freezes Over: Dante as Pilgrim and Poet in Inferno XXXII” by Lukas Cox ‘19

“License to Build: Readership and Authorship in Pynchon and Melville” by Marc Shkurovich ’19

“Vision, Voice, and Women in The Winter’s Tale” by Oriana Tang ’19

“ ‘A Pattern of your Love’: Sainthood as Erotic Example in ‘The Canonization’ and ‘The Relic’ ” by Eve Houghton ’17

“Whither Hast Thou, Fortune, Led?” by Daniel Pollack ’16

“The Governess Question: Modes of social engagement in Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre” by Helen Knight ’13

“The Limited Potential of True Reform” by Bianca Yuh ’12

“An Odyssey of Theodicy: Descartes’ Journey from the Perfection of God to the Error of Man” by Isabel Arroyo ’25

“Perfect and Imperfect Friendships in Nicomachean Ethics” by Lukas Bacho ’25

“Epicurus, Death, and Indifference: Is Death Really ‘Nothing to Us’?” by Enza Jonas-Giugni ’25

“Charlotte’s Finite Web: Causality in Aristotle’s Metaphysics” by Anya Richkind ’16

“Save Yourself from Yourself” by Ryan Hollander ’12

“The Moral Meaning of a Pause: Ethics Committees and the Cloning Debate” by Lindsay Gellman ’12

“The Prisoner Dis-Analogy as a Defense of Stem Cell Research on Spare Embryos” by Ilana Yurkiewicz ’10

“Feel Like a Natural Human: The Polis by Nature, and Human Nature in Aristotle’s The Politics” by Laura Zax ’10

“Telling a Lie to Save a Life: Kant’s Moral Failure and Mill’s Mere Suitability” by Brian Earp ’10

“Federal Funding for Embryonic Stem Cell Research” by Jurist Tan ’09

“Tread to the Dread Ahead: Wordplay on the Journey to Identity Development in ‘Erthe toc of erth’ and ‘The Road of the Dread’ by Zara Ranglin ’25

“Across the Islands: Lexical and Phonetic Variation in Hawai‘ian Dialects” by Jackson Petty ’21

“The Presentation of Disability in Everyday Life” by Jack Lattimore ’20

“Unweaving the ‘Development Narrative’: Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India“ by Alina Aksiyote Benardete ’16

“From Sanctuary to Cemetery: The Fate of Astoria and the Italian Immigrant Community” by Giovanni Bacarella ’15

“Preserving Values in a Market for Kidneys” by Cynthia Hua ’15

“A Diachronic Perspective on Semantic Maps” by Robert Yaman ’15

“Imagined Identities: The Tibetan Government-in-exile and the Western Vision of Tibet” by Emily Kruger ’08