University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Department: English
Email: sfallon@nd.edu
Bio: A scholar of Milton and early modern literature and intellectual history, Steve Fallon has written two books on Milton, one examining his materialism in light of seventeenth-century philosophical debates and the other exploring his anomalous self-representations against the background of conventional Puritan autobiography. He has also co-edited Milton’s Complete Poetry and Essential Prose for Modern Library and an essay collection, Immortality and the Body in the Age of 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 as well as a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Named the Milton Society of America’s Honored Scholar in 2011, he later served as the Society’s president. With Clark Power, 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 Educational Initiative, which offers AA and BA degree programs at Westville Correctional Facility. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and lyric poetry at the prison.
Selected Publications:
- Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton. Co-edited with John Rumrich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- Milton, John. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Co-edited with William Kerrigan and John Rumrich. New York: Random House, 2007.
- Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority. Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. (paperback edition, Cornell UP, 2008).
- Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991 (paperback edition, Cornell UP, 2006). Winner of Milton Society of America's Hanford Book Award.
- “Milton, Newton, and the Implications of Arianism.” In Milton in the Long Restoration. Ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro. Pp. 319-34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- “Milton in Intellectual History.” In A New Companion to Milton. Ed. Thomas N. Corns. Pp. 356-75. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
- "Wordsworth after Milton: Paradise Lost and Regained in 'Nutting.'" Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 13.2 (2015): 193-213.
- “Milton as Narrator in Paradise Lost.” In The Cambridge Companion to ‘Paradise Lost.’ Ed. Louis Schwartz. Pp. 3-16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
- “Milton and Literary Virtue.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 42 (2012): 181-200.
- “Nascent Republican Theory in Milton’s Regicide Prose.” In The Oxford Handbook to Literature and the English Revolution. Ed. Laura L. Knoppers. Pp. 309-26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- "Milton on Himself." In Milton in Context. Ed. Stephen Dobranski. Pp. 46-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- "'The strangest piece of reason': Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." In The Oxford Handbook to Milton. Ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith. Pp. 241-51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- “Paradise Lost in Intellectual History." In A Companion to Milton. Ed. Thomas N. Corns. Pp. 329-47. Oxford, Blackwell, 2001.
- “Hunting the Fox: Equivocation and Authorial Duplicity in The Prince.” PMLA 107 (1992): 1181-95.