Sam Fallon received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2015 and joined the Geneseo faculty in 2018. His research focuses on early modern literature, especially poetry and prose from Spenser to Milton.
His first book, Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England (Penn Press, 2019), charted the rise, in the last decades of the sixteenth century, of a new species of textual being—the serial, semifictional persona—arguing that personae from Edmund Spenser’s pastoral alter ego Colin Clout to Robert Greene’s revenant ghost animated the burgeoning literary field of late Elizabethan England, enabling writers to reckon with the new forms of mediation and publicity that framed the scene of literary production and reception.
His articles have appeared in journals including ELH, Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and address topics ranging from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. A long-standing interest in Milton has produced articles on the relationship between theology and narrative in Paradise Lost and, more recently, on love and election in Samson Agonistes.
He is currently at work on a book on Renaissance conceptions of literary character. Provisionally titled “One of a Kind: Character and Abstraction from Spenser to Milton,” the book examines the forms of typological thinking through which the individuating effects of character unexpectedly emerge. It considers a series of characters whose individuality emerges not in spite of but through their perception of themselves as indefinite, typical, ordinary, commonplace—as generic rather than special.
Publications
Book
Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. [Introduction]
Articles and Book Chapters
“Samson’s Ransom.” Milton Studies 67.1 (2025): 153-79.
“Reading Sidney.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philip Sidney. Ed. Catherine Bates. Oxford University Press, 2024. 797-811.
Review essay on Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi, Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Aaron Kunin, Character as Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), Genre 54.2 (2021): 293-305.
“Formal Men: On Parody and Character.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21.2 (2021), Special Issue: “Character Beyond Shakespeare”: 26-53.
“Nobody’s Business.” In Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public. Ed. Allison Deutermann, Musa Gurnis, and Matthew Hunter. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 217-43.
“Tautological Character: Troilus and Cressida and the Problems of Personation.” Shakespeare Survey 72 (2019): 219-33.
“Lately Sprung Up in America: Anne Bradstreet’s Untimely Worldmaking.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18.4 (Fall 2018): 100-23.
“Robert Greene’s Ghosts.” MLQ 77.2 (2016): 193-217.
“Astrophil, Philisides, and the Coterie in Print.” English Literary Renaissance 45.2 (2015): 175-204.
“Milton’s Strange God: Theology and Narrative Form in Paradise Lost.” ELH 79.1 (2012): 33-57.