By Gil Cruz and Rachel Klein Khalil

On a mild January day in 2019, RSA member Jonathan Shelley is inside the Metro Reentry Facility, a men’s prison in Atlanta, Georgia.

He’s standing in front of a dozen inmates—ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty-seven—and Shelley is talking Shakespeare.

“Does Shakespeare effectively speak to the experiences related to incarceration?” he asks. “Or does the experience of incarceration inform the reading of Shakespeare in ways that have not been fully considered?”

These are just two of the questions Shelley’s been pondering with Metro Reentry students for some time—questions he hopes to continue exploring through his 2020-21 Whiting Seed Grant. He was awarded the grant for his project, "Shakespeare and the Common Good Atlanta." A ten-year-old organization, Common Good Atlanta provides access to higher education for incarcerated people.

“I’m particularly interested in exploring how Shakespeare can be effectively used as a gateway into other kinds of literary or humanities study, or if there are other avenues for making such study more accessible,” Shelley says.

Shelley, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the first RSA-nominated Whiting Seed Grant recipient. He says he’s honored and grateful to have earned the distinction and that receiving a broad range of support was the most helpful piece to navigating the year-long submission process.

“I was very lucky to have a large number of colleagues both within Common Good Atlanta and at Georgia Tech that were willing to help.”

Receiving input throughout the entire application has proven to be a crucial element in Shelley’s success, enabling him to identify areas of the application that needed to be expanded and improved.

“All that activity provided more background and ideas that made it into the later iterations of the application,” he says.

This iterative process is indicative of Shelley’s proactive approach to volunteerism and community outreach. It was only after he had volunteered in the community and engaged with its members, that Shelley decided to apply for the grant.

“Practically speaking, I think it's much better to start a project and then apply for funds than to apply for funds and start the project if you get those funds,” he says. “I don’t think I would have known how to utilize the funds effectively if I didn’t have some sort of existing experience related to the project.” 

That same initiative led Shelley to volunteer in Atlanta, a city he had just moved to in 2018 as a postdoctoral fellow.
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Shelley outside the Metro Reentry Facility in October 2020. Since the pandemic began, Shelley delivers study materials to the students and picks up their completed work via individualized packets.
“It was very important to me that I make contributions to the city and community I was living in,” Shelley says. “I didn't want to feel like I was just ‘passing through’ on my way to another academic or professional position. Having just come out of grad school, I felt like I had knowledge to offer and share. That's what led me to start volunteering to teach at the prisons here in Atlanta.”

During his time as a volunteer, Shelley was inspired by the “thoughtful, considerate, [and] creative” work of his students.

“I regularly learn from them, and I wanted to create some kind of program or opportunity in which they and their work could teach others. This is what led to the project not only being a class but something that would create student-led curriculum for public use.”




Shelley, top row (center), with some of his students and Common Good Atlanta instructors over Zoom in November 2020.
Today, Shelley is partnering with Common Good Atlanta and the education and training director of the Atlanta Shakespeare Academy of the Shakespeare Tavern Playhouse to teach a free college-level Shakespeare course for Atlanta residents who have been released from prison. On a recent evening over Zoom, Shelley is speaking with students about their final course projects. Some of the students express a keen interest in the literary material of Shakespeare, while others are more concerned with its cultural components.

“It drives me up a wall if I’m stuck not engaging in something, whether it’s a sudoku puzzle or Shakespeare,” says student Michael Clark. "The unfortunate part is that for a long time I didn’t have access to Shakespeare, or really just classic literature, period. Of course, it’s like a body away from water: what do you do when you’re thirsting for it? You’re gonna wanna go toward it."

Shelley has high hopes for the future, seeking to extend his project to all of Common Good Atlanta’s classes and programs while providing space where a student’s post-incarceration work can be visible. He believes it is the student-led curriculum that will have the most impact in the coming years.

“I think any class on Shakespeare that I teach in the future, no matter what the context, would be interested in asking students to produce some kind of material that they think would assist in the teaching of Shakespeare today,” Shelley says.

Becoming the first RSA-nominated Whiting Seed Grant recipient has provided Shelley with professional, pedagogical, and scholarly opportunities and he encourages others to apply.

"There is much importance and promise with the kind of public engagement scholarship that these grants support," he says. "They really are a concrete means for encouraging and providing greater public access to scholarship and the humanities."