English PhD student Nicholas Cooley receives prestigious Winterthur fellowship

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Books open on a table
Materials from the Winterthur library. 
                                                   (winterthur.org)

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.


The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.