Honors and Awards

English Department’s Hayley Cotter Awarded Newberry Library Fellowship

Hayley Cotter, lecturer in the Department of English and Writing Program in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, has been awarded a long-term research fellowship from the Newberry Library in Chicago.

The award, funded by the Monticello College Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, will enable her to complete her second book project, “The Laws and Customs of the Early Modern Sea, 1483-1681,” and to work with the Newberry Library’s rich collection of materials related to maritime law and early modern culture.

Cotter’s research looks at early modern maritime law in a pan-European context and considers the materiality of printed texts as a central means of understanding the legal and cultural history of the sea. Employing methodological tools from a variety of disciplines, her work reveals the importance of understanding the period’s law of the sea: maritime law unlocks the worldwide Renaissance.

Map from John Selden's Mare clausum (London, 1635). Image courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Used with permission. — Map from John Selden’s Mare clausum (London, 1635). Image courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Used with permission.

Cotter’s project considers how early modern cartography interacted with maritime law in books such as John Selden’s “Mare Clausum” (London, 1635) and Claude Barthélemy Morisot’s “Orbis Maritime” (Dijon, 1643). Cotter advocates these decorated maps represent far more than ornaments supplementing the main text and offer fascinating examples of the power of cartography to visualize legal arguments concerning the sea. At the Newberry, she will have the opportunity to work with the library’s extensive collection of early modern cartographic materials.

Cotter was the 2023-24 Kemble Fellow in Maritime History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where she completed her first book manuscript, which explored how maritime law manifested itself in English Renaissance poetry, drama and visual culture.

She held a 2023 research fellowship from the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and was recently awarded a research fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America, allowing her to work in the special collections of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Her open-access article “The Ship Dieth at Sea: Metaphor and Maritime Law” was recently published by “Renaissance Quarterly.”