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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,  (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.