Stephen M. Fallon

John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities
Professor of English

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 and Intellectual History, Lyric Poetry

Bio

A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Steve Fallon is a scholar of Milton and early modern literature and intellectual history. He is the author of Milton among the Philosophers, winner of the Milton Society of America's Hanford Award, and Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority, winner of a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title award. He has co-edited The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton for Random House/Modern Library, the standard classroom text of Milton's works, as well as the essay collection Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton. Fallon has earned the Milton Society's lifetime achievement award. 

His Vital Minds: John Milton, Isaac Newton, and the Matter of Modernity, will be published in 2026 by Oxford University Press. Fallon is on the editorial bords 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 on an NEH Fellow as well as a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. 

With Clark Power, he co-founded a series of Notre Dame credit-bearing seminars on literary and philosophical classics at the South Bend Center for the Homeless. He is a founding member of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Moreau College Initiative, which offers AA and BA degrees at Westville Correctional Facility, where he has taught courses on Shakespear, Milton, and Lyric Poetry.