Stephen Fallon

Biography

Steve Fallon is Cavanaugh Professor Emeritus of the Humanities. A scholar of early modern literature and intellectual history, he is the author of Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (2007) and Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority (2008), both published by Cornell University Press. A Guggenheim Fellowship supported his research for Vital Minds: John Milton, Isaac Newton, and the Matter of Modernity, forthcoming in 2026 from Oxford University Press.. With William Kerrigan and John Rumrich, he edited Modern Library’s Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. Fallon served on the editorial board of the Yale Milton Encyclopedia and of Milton Studies and on the advisory boards of PMLA and Papers on Language and Literature. He has twice been an NEH Fellow. Named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2011, he later served twice as the Society’s president. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He co-founded a series of courses on literary and philosophical classics at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, and he is a founding member of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Notre Dame/Holy Cross Moreau College Initiative, which offers AA and BA degree programs at Westville Correctional Facility, where he has taught courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and lyric poetry.