Plans of Study

This certificate exposes students to multiple forms of expertise within Yale’s special collections libraries, equips them with new analytical skills, and teaches them the methodologies that scholars, librarians, archivists, conservators, and curators employ as they preserve, interrogate, and steward the human record.

Collections: Objects, Research, Society signals an expansive interest in a wide variety of materials and media—including manuscripts, written documents, and paper-based records, as well as film, audio, and other digital formats. The certificate encourages students to consider both digital and physical objects in dialogue with each other, bridging the fields of museum studies, library/archival theory and practice, book history, and cultural studies to prompt students to think critically about both objects and the repositories in which they are held. Students engage with Yale Library’s special collections repositories, including: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Film Archive, Whitney Medical Historical Library, Divinity Library, Gilmore Music Library, Haas Family Arts Library, the Lewis Walpole Library. Additionally, students will have opportunities to work with the Yale Peabody Museum, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Law Library, and the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

For more information visit the Yale Bulletin. 

The archive, the book: our ability to bear witness, hold history to account, and imagine a more just future is at the core of the humanities as a scholarly project. The certificate in Material Histories of the Human Record is designed to expose students to multiple forms of expertise within Yale’s special collections libraries, equip emerging scholars with new analytical skills, and teach them the methodologies that scholars, librarians, archivists, conservators, and curators employ as they preserve, interrogate, and steward the human record. Drawing on Yale Libraries’ extraordinary collections and staff expertise, and the ongoing faculty interest in the histories and politics of archives, the material text, and metadata, a graduate certificate in Material Histories of the Human Record fosters innovation at the interstices and intersections of disciplines.

“Material histories” signals an expansive interest in a wide variety of materials and media—not only manuscripts, written documents and paper-based records, but also papyrus fragments, tablets, photographs, film, textile, audio, three-dimensional works, and other formats. The purview of the certificate also necessarily includes an engagement with the opportunities and challenges of new digital methods for preservation, cataloging, and research. Areas of particular focus for the certificate may include: archival studies and theories of archives; global histories of the book; material formats and their histories; the non-neutrality of metadata; privacy and questions of evidence; social injustice in/and/as the historical record; preservation and conservation science; international law, the book trade, and provenance.

For more information visit the certificate website.