Jon joined the department in 2018 after receiving his B.A. in English from Bard College. His research interests include 19th and 20th century American fiction, film noir, critical theory, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, and labor history. His dissertation, titled The Contingencies of Naturalism: Accidental Subjectivities in Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Evelyn Scott, explores the development of American literary naturalism, placing the title authors in conversation with an intellectual history of post-Darwinian thought that includes the work of Herbert Spencer, William James, and Sigmund Freud, and within an institutional history of early psychology and sociology.

Jon has precepted for courses in 19th Century Fiction and Children’s Literature for the Princeton English Department, as well as for Introduction to American Studies. He served as the co-chair of the Princeton Americanist Colloquium from fall of 2019 to spring of 2021, and he was nominated as his cohort’s WGGI rep in fall of 2022. Before joining the department, he taught 9th grade English for the Fordham University branch of the TRIO Upward Bound program, and he worked as Tutor Coordinator for the Bard College Learning Commons. He is currently the inaugural Princeton GradFutures Social Impact Fellow at the American Philosophical Society Press.