Dr Richard Fallon BA, MA, PhD

Dr Richard Fallon

Department of English Literature
Honorary Research Fellow

Contact details

Address
Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I study interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century. Within this area my specialisms are the literature of the earth sciences, scientific writing for general readers, and turn-of-the-century adventure novels. My earlier work has examined the literary popularisation of dinosaurs and my current project is called ‘Borderline Geoscience and Transatlantic Literature in the Age of Lost Worlds’.

Qualifications

  • BA (University of Leicester)
  • MA (University of Leicester)
  • PhD (University of Leicester)

Biography

I joined the Department in September 2020 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. Previously, I took all my degrees at the University of Leicester, including an MA in Victorian Studies. As a PhD student I was also jointly part of the doctoral cohort of the Natural History Museum, London. During my undergraduate degree I studied on an Erasmus Programme year abroad at the University of Turin.

Research

I study interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century. Within this area my specialisms are the literature of the earth sciences, scientific writing for general readers, and turn-of-the-century adventure novels.

My doctoral research explored how and why ‘dinosaur’ became a household word in Britain and the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Many fossil dinosaurs were excavated in the US during this period, and I argued that their transatlantic fame and cultural relevance were built up in the publications of various popular writers. Using modern literary forms, these opinionated authors incorporated dinosaurs into saleable narratives of romance, progress, and imperial expansion—often undermining the conclusions of established scientists. As such, I contested, British and American authors outside the scientific elite played a major and surprising role in making these prehistoric animals iconic. My book on this subject is currently in the works.

Currently I am examining transatlantic geoscience between the 1860s and the 1920s, focusing on one of the stranger sides of its print culture. This period was characterised by fierce disputes about the planet's deep history, at the centre and at the fringes of science and everywhere in between. What did evolution mean for religion? Were the continents mobile? Was Atlantis real? Was the earth hollow? There existed no standard model of geoscientific authorship during these decades, leaving issues like disciplinary authority, literary style, and the relevance of religion up for debate. I will clarify how contemporaries navigated this terrain by analysing three ‘borderline’ genres of literature: lost-world fiction, religious geohistories, and eccentric geological monographs.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Fallon, R 2021, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, vol. 132, Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108989008

Article

Fallon, R 2024, 'Decadent Dinosaurs: Directed Evolution in British and North American Literature, 1890s–1970s', Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 55–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-11098327

Fallon, R 2023, 'Discovering the Living Fossil Short Story in the Late Nineteenth Century', Comparative American Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2247781

Fallon, R 2023, 'The illustrated natural history lectures of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins given in Britain, 1850s–1880s', Archives of Natural History, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 347–369. https://doi.org/10.3366/anh.2023.0866

Fallon, R 2022, 'Seen through deep time: occult clairvoyance and palaeoscientific imagination', Journal of Victorian Culture. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac069

Fallon, R 2020, 'Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Illustrating the Romance of Science', English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 162-92. <https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/The_Romance_of_Science_and_the_Illustrations_in_Arthur_Conan_Doyle_s_The_Lost_World/12951053/1>

Fallon, R 2018, '"Literature Rather Than Science”: Henry Neville Hutchinson (1856-1927) and the Literary Borderlines of Science Writing', Journal of Literature and Science, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 50-65. https://doi.org/10.12929/jls.11.1.04

Anthology

Fallon, R 2021, Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters. Valancourt Books, Richmond, VA.

Book/Film/Article review

Fallon, R 2021, 'Hadas Elber-Aviram, Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, ISBN 9781350110670, £85', Archives, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 157-159. https://doi.org/10.3828/archives.2021.10

Fallon, R 2017, 'Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology: (Book Review)', Museum & Society, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 264-66. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v15i2.837

View all publications in research portal