Jonah Shallit first taught writing at Johns Hopkins in 2022. A PhD Candidate in the department of English, he holds a BA in English from the University of Toronto. His dissertation research explores how many Anglophone modernists, including James Joyce and H. G. Wells, crafted their literary work as responses to social movements like Esperanto—utopian projects to build universal languages.
More broadly, his research and teaching draws connections between writing and institutional, political, and social histories. At Johns Hopkins, he has taught courses on writing and the university and on chess and aesthetics, to JHU students and to the broader public.
His writing has appeared in Australian Literary Studies and the Wallace Stevens Journal.
“Kangaroo Redux: Reading the Conflicts of South Australian Settler Colonialism in the 1858 and 1885 Editions of W.A. Cawthorne's Kuperree” Australian Literary Studies vol. 37 no. 2, 2022.
- Joint winner of the ALS PhD Essay Prize
(With Jungmin Yoo and Abdul-Karim Mustapha) “Poetic Models of History and Time in Harmonium” Wallace Stevens Journal 47 (2), 236-241, 2023.
With the University Writing Program, he teaches Reintroduction to Writing: The University and the World.
He has taught Chess as Art as an Intersession course and a public humanities course with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.