Yale Directed Studies

Yale Directed Studies To learn more about Yale Directed Studies, contact our Director of Undergraduate Studies: [email protected] to be put in touch with a DS Ambassador.

Our wonderful alum James Prud’homme, graduating senior, reflects on his first college year spent in Directed Studies. Li...
05/15/2026

Our wonderful alum James Prud’homme, graduating senior, reflects on his first college year spent in Directed Studies. Link in bio!

Hooray for this year's prize winners! 1. The winners of the 2025-26 Riggs prize, awarded by faculty teaching in DS, went...
04/29/2026

Hooray for this year's prize winners!
1. The winners of the 2025-26 Riggs prize, awarded by faculty teaching in DS, went to (left to right): Teresa Ng, Adrian Turkedjiev, and Sam Yu. The winning students were praised for being "intellectually sophisticated as well as thoughtful and humble" class participants, and for producing written work that "possesses remarkable analytical clarity" and shows "deep curiosity" about the world.
2. The winners of this year's DS Peer Prize, nominated by their fellow students, went to (left to right): Margot Kelsey, Joy Zhou, and Ty Ishikawa. Margot, Joy, and Ty were praised by their peers for the care, thoughtful support, and chivalry (!) they have shown throughout their year in DS.
We're so proud of the whole cohort! Now go study for those exams...

Application to join Directed Studies for 2026-27 is now open! Link in bio (leads to our website, the application is in t...
04/29/2026

Application to join Directed Studies for 2026-27 is now open! Link in bio (leads to our website, the application is in the right hand box on the home page). Deadline 5pm ET on Friday May 29th. We can’t wait to meet you this Fall!
And while you contemplate your application, please enjoy this little selection of 2025-26 DS highlights chosen by our current students. More coming soon!

Prefrosh, come talk to us during Bulldog Days! We can’t wait to meet you!
04/06/2026

Prefrosh, come talk to us during Bulldog Days! We can’t wait to meet you!

DS students, don’t miss out on the final Beinecke event of the DS year! Join Professor Rubright and Beinecke curators on...
04/03/2026

DS students, don’t miss out on the final Beinecke event of the DS year! Join Professor Rubright and Beinecke curators on a hunt specially designed for DS through the extraordinary treasury of the Beinecke Library’s holdings! Fri 4/10, 2.30. You must sign up first!

“Vocalists, Vocalism, Vocality: A Technical and Functional Introduction.” This talk offers ways to listen to and underst...
03/23/2026

“Vocalists, Vocalism, Vocality: A Technical and Functional Introduction.” This talk offers ways to listen to and understand the sung voice with the pleasure it deserves. Taking classical vocalists as examples, it lays out many of the fundamental tenets of healthy singing. The approach is technical and functional rather than critical, it being assumed that evaluations best inform preference when they follow comprehension. Topics to be discussed include the two registers of the voice, chest and head; the effect of the orchestra on vocal production; the ideal form of vibrato; vocal agility; and the varieties of interpretative possibilities open to singers and the ways in which these possibilities can be realized. The lecture will conclude with an analysis of various performances of the high C phrase in “Salut demeure” from Gounod’s Faust meant to illustrate the significance of seemingly small interpretive and technical differences.

Snacks will be provided ahead of the event!

Thanks very much to James for his work putting this together, and for all his work supporting Directed Studies.

Congratulations to DS alum Noah Tirschwell and his fellow recipients of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship for graduate ...
11/18/2025

Congratulations to DS alum Noah Tirschwell and his fellow recipients of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship for graduate study at Oxford University in the UK! Noah, not only an alum but also a beloved peer writing tutor and enthusiastic all round supporter of our program, continues the DS winning streak for major postgraduate awards, and we couldn’t be prouder!

Don’t miss our final colloquium of the semester “Translating Creation,”a talk in two parts:First, an insider’s overview ...
11/02/2025

Don’t miss our final colloquium of the semester “Translating Creation,”a talk in two parts:
First, an insider’s overview of translation—translation as a basic human activity that we all do all the time, for better and worse; and also translation as, and of, literature;  
And second, a look at “translating creation” through the keyhole of the Bible, and in a way that relates to the first part of the presentation. Monday 11/3 at 4pm in HQL02. Come early for cookies outside the auditorium!

What’s the Greek Word for “Picnic”? Adventures in Translating the Odyssey In this lecture, author, critic, classicist, a...
10/14/2025

What’s the Greek Word for “Picnic”? Adventures in Translating the Odyssey

In this lecture, author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn takes his audience into the heart of the process of translating. Beginning with the dauntingly enigmatic adjective that Homer uses to describe his hero in the first line of the poem—polytropos, “of many turns,” about which no two translators have ever agreed—Mendelsohn will present a series of case studies in translation culled from his own experience during his six years working on his Odyssey. In so doing, he allows the audience to watch the translator at work as he grapples with the distinctive technical challenges posed by Homer’s verse: its meter and rhythms, diction and tone, the poet’s use of line-breaks, alliteration, and assonance, and the real meaning of famous phrases such as “gray-eyed Athena” and “wingèd words.” (Hint: they don’t have wings.)

Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, and translator. His books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; as well as a translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy. His honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. Mendelsohn’s new translation of the Odyssey has been called “the edition for our time and beyond” by Jorie Graham and “fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment” by Lee Child. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

For the first Directed Studies Colloquium of the semester, we are joined by Erika Valdivieso, Assistant Professor of Cla...
09/28/2025

For the first Directed Studies Colloquium of the semester, we are joined by Erika Valdivieso, Assistant Professor of Classics at Yale. The title of the talk is “Translation: Adapting, Transforming, Transferring.”

When: Tuesday 9/30, 4pm

Where: Humanities Quadrangle, Room L02

This talk is designed to usher DS students through the pleasures and perils of reading ancient texts in translation. Part guided discussion, part lecture, the session will take the audience through three ways of thinking about translation: as adaptation between media; as a transformation between languages; as an act of transference between cultures.

All are welcome to join!

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