By Jim Shelton, Register Staff

Behind many great men and women, there’s a dissertation.

It sits hidden, like an intellectual paper trail, just waiting to reveal subtle signs of future success. Perhaps it foreshadows a lifelong obsession with a specific topic, or signals a certain world view. At the very least, it reflects a writer’s analytical style and approach to organizing thoughts.

“It is the open-sesame to an academic life,” says Howard Lamar, Yale’s Sterling professor emeritus of history, who has helped direct 65 dissertations. “You find a subject that either hasn’t been done at all or hasn’t been handled well, look at all the original materials relating to it and bring to it a perspective of your own.”

Dissertations are research papers presented by candidates for doctoral degrees. They typically require years of work, monitored by a small academic committee.

New Haven has nurtured an estimated 15,000 of these typewritten time capsules since awarding the nation’s first Ph.D. degree in 1861.

“They come in to us in December and May,” explains Diane Kaplan, head of public services for the manuscripts and archives department at the Yale library. “People now recognize that these are records of permanent scholarship. Unfortunately, many of the early dissertations didn’t survive.”

For example, all we know of Edward Bouchet’s 1876 dissertation is the title: “Measuring Refractive Indices.” Bouchet was the first African-American to earn a doctorate.

Even more elusive are the hundreds of thousands of senior essays and graduate school projects in law, art and other disciplines. The vast majority of those are not archived and exist only if students choose to keep them — or turn them into national monuments.

That was the case with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It began as Yale graduate Maya Lin’s senior thesis project in 1981.

“Actually, it was a senior thesis in which about 12 seniors at Yale decided to find a professor,” Lin told Bay Area interviewer Michael Krasny some years ago. “We wanted to study funereal architecture. And throughout the course of my senior year, we made different works that dealt with man and his mortality in the built form. Someone saw a poster for a competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and we thought, ‘What a nice idea. We’ll just take that idea, and we’ll use that as our last project!’ So I basically designed the memorial for a student class.”

This week, as another crop of students heads into the final stretch with dissertations, essays and final projects of their own, we take a look at some noteworthy predecessors.

DISSERTATION DU JOUR

Let’s start with some dissertations.

Anyone who appreciates the wonders of electronics — aka everyone — owes a debt of gratitude to Lee deForest’s 1899 dissertation. Called “Reflection of electric waves of very high frequencies at the ends of parallel wires,” the paper was a ground-breaking examination of radio waves. It led to deForest’s invention of the audion, also known as the triode, which boosted weak electric signals to allow for voice transmission.

Literary-minded folks can smile knowingly at the dissertation of novelist Tom Wolfe in 1956. What topic did this author of such class-conscious books as “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” tackle?

It was a 371-page paper called, “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942.”

Here are a few others to consider:

‰Ernesto Zedillo, who would go on to become president of Mexico, did his 1981 economics dissertation on “External Public Indebtedness in Mexico: Recent History and Future Oil Bounded Optimal Growth.”

‰Future Connecticut Gov. Wilbur Cross wrote his 1889 dissertation on 18th-century sentimentalism in France and England.

‰Feminist author Camille Paglia wrote her 1974 paper on “Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art.” The dissertation would later become the basis for her 1990 book, “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.”

‰Maury Yeston, the Tony-winning composer of the Broadway musicals “Nine” and “Titanic,” wrote a 205-page dissertation on “The Stratification of Musical Rhythm” in 1974.

‰Also in 1974, Joseph Donald McClatchy Jr. wrote a dissertation entitled “Blood-Hot and Personal: The Tradition of Contemporary Confessional Poetry.” McClatchy would go on to become an acclaimed poet, editor and Yale faculty member.

‰Lamar’s dissertation, published in 1956, became his first book, “Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics.”

Lamar says he originally wanted to write about an aspect of American political history, but discovered that his topic was already being researched by another doctoral candidate.

“I looked around for something fresh to do,” he recalls. “At that time, the university had acquired the Coe collection. I saw that the history of western territories before they became states was a neglected area of study.”

Not that his good fortune kept him from feeling the intense pressures of dissertation writing and scholarly review.

“That’s always nerve-wracking,” he says.

NAME THAT THESIS

Other graduate-level projects and senior theses have been just as ambitious or telling:

‰Actress Jodie Foster, whose career is filled with roles of women overcoming oppression, violence and obstacles, wrote her senior thesis on Toni Morrison’s novel, “Song of Solomon,” and its relationship to the African-American oral narrative tradition. The actress returns to Yale at 5 p.m. Wednesday for “A Conversation with Jodie Foster” following a screening of her “The Silence of the Lambs” in the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall St. For more information, e-mail erin.doherty@yale.edu.

‰Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman did his senior thesis on former Democratic National Committee Chairman John Bailey of Connecticut. The paper also became Lieberman’s first book.

‰“Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau developed a fictional character for his Yale thesis, a biography of a Nazi Luftwaffe pilot.

‰Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who earned a Yale law degree, wrote his thesis about Newark.

‰The late playwright Wendy Wasserstein saw her 1976 MFA thesis performed on stage. “Uncommon Women and Others,” which would be emblematic of Wasserstein’s personal, yet relatable plays, was later produced on Broadway and broadcast on PBS.

‰Actor Paul Giamatti wrote his senior thesis on Herman Melville, whose books are brimming with just the sort of flinty American characters Giamatti has spent years portraying.

THE PAPER CHASE

Of course, even a routine college paper can lead to big things.

Perhaps the most famous example at Yale has to do with Federal Express founder Fred Smith, who is a 1966 Yale graduate.

According to Smith, he wrote a paper for an economics class that explored the idea for overnight delivery systems in the coming computer era. Smith doesn’t remember his grade for the paper, just that the professor wasn’t impressed.

Jim Shelton can be reached at (203) 789-5664 or jshelton@nhregister.com.