Dr Richard Fallon

I am a literary and cultural historian of science interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about Earth’s history. In recent years, I have been working increasingly closely with natural history collections and I am currently a Research Associate in Natural History Humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. My project at the Sedgwick Museum, ‘Re-Excavating the Cambridge School of Geology, 1850–1914’, uses the University's collections both to explore how women entered the world of professional palaeontology and to examine the changing place of Christianity in Victorian science. Previously, I was Deputy Leader of Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum, London.

Others topics of my research have included occult palaeontology, Young-Earth Creationism, non-Darwinian conceptions of evolution in literary culture, Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, and the popularisation of dinosaurs. My second monograph, Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2025), was an output of my Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, held at the University of Birmingham between 2020 and 2023.

My previous book, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), built on my University of Leicester PhD, which was awarded in 2019. I have published articles in various academic journals, such as Twentieth-Century Literature, Archives of Natural History, and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in media for general audiences, including History Today and the Public Domain Review. 

• 2025 to present: Research Associate in Natural History Humanities (Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge); project 'Re-Excavating the Cambridge School of Geology, 1850–1914'.
• 2024 to 2025: Postdoctoral Researcher (Natural History Museum, London) and Postdoctoral KE Fellow (School of English, University of Nottingham).
• 2020 to 2023: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (School of English, Drama and Creative Studies, University of Birmingham); project: 'Borderline Geoscience and Transatlantic Literature in the Age of Lost Worlds'.
• 2015 to 2019: PhD in English (School of Arts, University of Leicester); thesis: 'Reshaping Dinosaurs: The Popularisation of Palaeontology in Anglo-American Culture, 1877–1921'.
• 2014 to 2015: MA in Victorian Studies (School of Arts, University of Leicester).
• 2010 to 2014: BA in English with a Year Abroad (School of Arts, University of Leicester).