Yale University alumni

Froelich Gladstone Rainey (June 18, 1907 – October 11, 1992) was an American anthropologist and Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology from 1947 to 1977. Under his leadership, the Penn Museum announced the Pennsylvania Declaration, ending the purchase system of acquiring antiquities and artifacts that had, in practice, encouraged looting from historical sites.
In the early 1950s, Rainey also devised and hosted the popular "What in the World?" television gameshow, which highlighted the museum's collections and involved notable scholars and celebrities of the day. In 1975, in recognition of his role at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he had served as the university's first professor of anthropology from 1935 to 1942, Rainey's Cabin on the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Frederic Prokosch (May 17, 1906 – June 2, 1989) was an American writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator.

William Procter Matthews III (November 11, 1942 – November 12, 1997) was an American poet and essayist.

William Lucius Cary (1910–1983) served as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission between 1961 and 1964.
Chairman Cary graduated from Yale University in 1931 and later served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the former Yugoslavia and Romania during World War II. He was a Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia University when President John F. Kennedy appointed him as SEC Chairman.
In 1974 he wrote Federalism and Corporate Law: Reflections Upon Delaware, an article in the Yale Law Journal that has been cited frequently for decades as the classic argument for federalizing the issuance of corporate charters.

Julia Glass (born March 23, 1956) is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002.Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.
Glass was born in Boston, grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts and Lincoln, Massachusetts, and attended Concord Academy. She graduated from Yale in 1978. Intending to become a painter, she moved to New York City, where she lived for many years, painting in a small studio in Brooklyn and supporting herself as a freelance editor and copy editor, including several years in the copy department of Cosmopolitan magazine. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her partner, the photographer Dennis Cowley, and their two children, and works as a freelance journalist and editor, while teaching fiction writing at Emerson College. She is a previous winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Shannon Patricia Elizabeth O'Brien (born April 30, 1959) is an American politician and attorney who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1987 through 1993, in the Massachusetts Senate from 1993 through 1995, and was the Massachusetts state treasurer from 1999 through 2003. In that last position she became the first woman to be elected in Massachusetts to statewide office by her own accord. She was the Democratic Party nominee in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, but lost in the general election to Mitt Romney.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (; May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of queer theory, and her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies, in which she was one of the most influential figures. Sedgwick's essays became the framework for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and gay studies.In her 1985 book Between Men, she analyzed male homosocial desire and English literature. In 1991, she published "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl", an article that received attention as part of an American culture war and criticism for associating the works of Jane Austen with sex. She coined the terms homosocial and antihomophobic.Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick analyzed homoerotic subplots in the work of writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. Her works reflected an interest in a range of issues, including queer performativity, experimental critical writing, the works of Marcel Proust, non-Lacanian psychoanalysis, artists' books, Buddhism and pedagogy, the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, and material culture, especially textiles and texture.

John Ringling North (August 14, 1903 – June 4, 1985) was the president and director of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus from 1937 to 1943 and again from 1947 to 1967.

Vanessa Bradford Kerry (born December 31, 1976) is an American physician, public health expert, and advocate. She is a founder of the non-profit Seed Global Health, director of the Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and serves as the Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for the World Health Organization (WHO).

Carol Schlosberg (14 June 1957 – 29 March 1998) was an American painter who was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and had been an art instructor at Yale University where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in 1992. She was a resident of Vermont at the time of her death.During her brief career, she was known for abstract works that have been described as "textured, abstract, sometimes geometric, sometimes free-form." Her career was cut short when she was murdered during a vacation trip to Mexico in 1998.