Sam Fallon joined the Geneseo faculty in 2018. His research focuses on early modern literature.
His first book, Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), charts the rise, at the turn of the seventeenth century, of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. Paper Monsters shows how personae animated a burgeoning literary field’s sense of itself, and it explores their role in framing new forms of public, textual identity.
His interests range across the early modern period, and his other work includes articles (either published or forthcoming) on theology and narrative form in Paradise Lost, on forms of character in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and on worldmaking and lyric temporality in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. He is currently at work on a second project on literary character and the early modern discourse of “personation.”
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.
