University of Iowa English PhD student Nicholas Cooley has been selected to receive a Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Wilmington, Del.
With the fellowship, Cooley will stay on the grounds for one month and will be given access to the library, special collections, and exhibits. Winterthur’s museum of decorative arts includes nearly 90,000 objects made or used in American between about 1640 and 1860.
Cooley’s research is on representations of hand tools in various genres of 19th century American literature. He is particularly interested in Winterthur’s reconstructed 18th century woodworking shop, which overlaps with his interest in hand tools. He hopes the archives and museum will help him build 19th century cultural and material contexts for these literary depictions of day-to-day tools.
Cooley is a doctoral student in the Department of English, part of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.