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. An interdisciplinary scholar of religion and literature, he specializes in the study of Judaism, from rabbinic literature through modern Jewish thought and literature in the United States and Europe. He is especially interested in the uncanny power of religious traditions to determine putatively secular institutions, discourses, and categories in so-called Western modernity, as well as in philosophical and political problems concerning the concepts of tradition, authority, canon, and interpretation. He is currently completing his first book, which investigates the critical function of Judaic texts, tropes, and traditions in poststructuralist literary theory during the height of its American institutional influence in the 1980s. In addition to academic journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, he writes for wider audiences in venues such as Jewish Currents, Parapraxis, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

curriculum vitae

• “Auerbach's Abraham(s): Biblical Narrative and the Genesis of Critical Reading,” Prooftexts 42.1 (Spring 2026): 63–95.
• “'No Sin to Limp': Critique as Error in Geoffrey Hartman's Essays on Midrash,” Naharaim 16.1 (June 2022): 53–77.

• “Text,” in Sarah Hammerschlag, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025): 403–418.
• “Milton's Terrorism: Literature and Religion After 9/11,” in Sheera Talpaz and Anuradha Needham, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and the Nation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025): 223–235.
• “Rabbinic Exegesis and Literary Theory,” in Naomi Seidman, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).