Stephen Fallon
John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities
Professor, Program of Liberal Studies; Faculty Fellow, Nanovic Institute of European Studies; Affiliated Faculty, Initiative on Race and Resilience
Areas of study
- Early Modern
- Religion and Literature
Education
Ph.D. English, University of Virginia
M.A. English, McGill University
A.B. English, Princeton University
Research and teaching interests
Milton, Early Modern English Literature, Lyric Poetry
Biography
Steve Fallon is Cavanaugh Professor 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 and Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority. With William Kerrigan and John Rumrich, he edited Modern Library’s Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. A Guggenheim Fellowship is supporting his current book project on parallels in the thought of Milton and Isaac Newton. Fallon is on the editorial boards of the Yale Milton Encyclopedia and of Milton Studies; he is on the advisory board of Papers on Language and Literature, and he has served on the advisory board of PMLA. He has twice been an NEH Fellow. Named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2011, he later served 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 at the prison.
Representative publications
- Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Cornell UP, 2007)
- Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Cornell UP, 1991)
- The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, co-edited with William Kerrigan and John Rumrich (Modern Library, 2007)
- “John Milton, Isaac Newton, and the Life of Matter,” in Milton and the New Scientific Age, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Routledge, 2019)
- “The Fortunate/Unfortunate Fall and Two Varieties of Immortality in Paradise Lost,” in Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton, ed. John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon (Cambridge UP, 2018)