Stephen Fallon
Cavanaugh Professor Emeritus of the Humanities
- Department
- Program of Liberal Studies and Department of English
- College or School
- College of Arts and Letters
- Year of Emeritus Status 2023
Having joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1985, Steve Fallon retired in 2023 as John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities and holder of joint appointments in the Program of Liberal Studies and the Department of English. 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. His work has been supported by four national fellowships, including a Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in 1984-85, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships in 1988-89 and 1995-96, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016-17. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Milton Society of America in 2011, and he subsequently served as the Society’s president in 2015-16 and again in 2023-24. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He continues to work as a scholar and is currently completing a book on parallels in the thought of John Milton and Isaac Newton.
Steve has won numerous teaching awards, including the College of Arts and Letters’ Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has worked to expand the reach of Notre Dame’s teaching mission beyond the university's walls. With his colleague Clark Power, he founded a series of Notre Dame credit-bearing courses on literary and philosophical classes at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, where he taught weekly during the academic year from 1998-2013. In 2012-13, he helped launch the A.A. and B.A. degree-granting programs at Indiana’s Westville-Correctional Facility, where to date he has taught courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and lyric poetry.
That program, now named the Moreau College Initiative, continues to thrive, having by 2023 awarded more than 100 A.A. degrees and 35 B.A. degrees. Post-retirement, Steve continues to teach in the prison and serve on the Advisory Committee of the Moreau College Initiative as well as on the Advisory Committee of the newly established Notre Dame Programs for Education in Prisons.
Email: sfallon@nd.edu