Degrees:
Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago
M.A., Univ. of Chicago
B.A., Middlebury College
Samuel P. Catlin joined the Trinity College faculty in 2025 after previously teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo and at the University of Chicago, where he earned a joint doctorate in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies in 2022. He is a scholar of religion and literature specializing in Judaism, from biblical and rabbinic literatures to modern Jewish thought and literature in the United States and Europe. He is especially interested in the politics of tradition, authority, canon, and interpretation. Other research areas include secularism and its discontents; psychoanalysis; gender and sexuality; continental philosophy and critical theory; the US "culture wars"; and critical higher education studies.
He is currently completing his first book, tentatively titled Judaism in Theory, which traces how six US-based literary critics and cultural theorists writing in the 1980s drew upon Judaic texts, traditions, and tropes in order to critique and reimagine the relationships between truth, representation, and power in post-Holocaust modernity. In addition to academic journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, he writes regularly for wider audiences, in venues including Jewish Currents, Parapraxis, The New Republic, Political Theology Network, and elsewhere.
At Trinity, Prof. Catlin teaches courses on Jews and Judaism from antiquity to the present, and on religion and literature. His courses are text-centered and discussion-based, emphasizing the interrogation of received assumptions and the cultivation of the ability to read with patience, curiosity, and respect. These are vital skills not only for understanding religions in all their historical and global diversity, but also for navigating contemporary social and political life in an increasingly mediated world where the grounds of power, authority, and legitimacy seem only to be growing more mysterious to us.
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