• Thomas Patch, The Golden Asses

Welcome

As of May 15, 2023 Special Collections units at Yale University are open to Yale-affiliated faculty, students, and staff and to non-Yale researchers who comply with the Yale Covid Visitor’s Policy.

The Lewis Walpole Library does not require a reservation, but we appreciate being informed in advance of any planned research visit since space in the Reading Room is limited. 


The Lewis Walpole Library is a research center for eighteenth-century studies and an essential resource for the study of Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill. Its collections include important holdings of eighteenth-century British prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, paintings, and decorative arts. Given to Yale by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1895-1979) and Annie Burr Lewis (1902-1959), the Lewis Walpole Library is located in Farmington, Connecticut, in several eighteenth-century buildings on a fourteen-acre campus. The Lewis Walpole Library is a department of Yale University Library and open to researchers.


At the library....

Welcome Fellows
 
We are delighted to welcome our Visiting Fellows to the library.  First to arrive are the remainder of our very patient “COVID Cohort” of researchers who have been waiting for three years to take up their 2020-2021 Fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library. In addition, the new crop of 2023-24 Fellows begin to arrive with the start of the new Fellowship year on June 1. 
 
 l is an interior of a wood-paneled library with a woman speaking with an electronic screen behind her; center is a view of the reading room with large table with three researchers seated looking at library materials; r shows a terrace with tables at which adults sit in conversation in front of a white clapboard house
 
The library offers a variety of fellowships and travel grants to support research focused in the library’s rich collections of eighteenth-century materials.
 
Residential Visiting Fellowships bring scholars from across the globe to Farmington for two or four weeks to undertake research in library collections on a wide variety of topics related to Britain in the eighteenth-century world. 
 
Summer Fellowships for Yale Graduate Students afford students whose topic of research is supported by the library’s collections the opportunity to spend two, four, or eight weeks during June through August in residence at the library. Opportunities for 2023 are still available, and Yale graduate students are invited to apply.
 
 

News

May 2, 2023
The  Library is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2023-2024 Fellowship and Travel Grant awards. To see the list of receipients, visit our Fellowship Awards page.
a short-statured figure with knees together, one hand raised in an oratorial gesture, the other holding a bag over his shoulder stands on a three-legged stool addressing an older man in a wig who leans down over a sign, a group of men sit on the left.
May 2, 2023
In this entry for the Scholars’ Progress blog, Miriam Wallace recounts her experience researching “ ‘speaking subjects’—that is, considering how the visual record...
February 13, 2023
Postponed: Date tba - 10:30 am - 3:00 pm The Lewis Walpole Library is pleased to host a collections-based seminar for graduate students around the exhibition Knight Errant of...