|
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. 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, tentatively titled Judaism in Theory, which traces the afterlife of Jewish texts, traditions, and tropes in writings by twentieth-century philosophers, theorists, and critics including Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others. 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, Political Theology Network, and elsewhere.
Prof. Catlin's Religious Studies 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. |
-
Jews and Judaism from antiquity to the present
-
Religion and literature
-
History and theory of interpretation
-
Modern Jewish philosophy and literature
-
US Jewish literature and culture
-
Theories and methods for Religious Studies
-
Political, legal, moral, and social philosophy
-
The Holocaust
|
RELG-224
|
American Jewish Literature Since 1865
|
|
-
Modern Jewish philosophy and literature
-
US Jewish literature and culture
-
Biblical and rabbinic literature
-
Secularism and its discontents
-
Continental philosophy and critical theory
-
Psychoanalysis, queer theory, theories of gender and sexuality
-
History of literary criticism and theory
-
Political theology and political theory
-
Critical higher education studies and the history of US higher education
-
The US "culture wars"
-
Anti-Judaism and anti-semitism
|
Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
- “Auerbach's Abraham(s): Biblical Narrative and the Genesis of Critical Reading,” Prooftexts 42.1 (Winter 2026): 63–95.
- “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.
- “'No Sin to Limp': Critique as Error in Geoffrey Hartman's Essays on Midrash,” Naharaim 16.1 (June 2022): 53–77.
Selected Essays:
- “The Campus Does Not Exist,” Parapraxis 4 (Summer 2024): 40–47.
- “Death of an Author,” Political Theology Network (June 9, 2023).
Selected Book Reviews:
- “Censorship, Pornography, Dissent,” roundtable on Anthony Petro, Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming 2026).
- “Canceling the World,” review of Adrian Daub, The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024), The New Republic (December 2024 print issue): 58–61.
Selected Recent Lectures and Presentations:
- “A Jew is Being Beaten, or Anti-Semitism in Theory,” Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University (March 2026)
- “Screwed Secular: Lee Edelman's Political Theology,” annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Montréal, QC (February 2026)
- “Sibboleth: Colonial Monolingualism and the Poetics of Jewish Identity,” Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester (May 2025)
|
- Summer Fellowship, Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, Holocaust Educational Foundation, Northwestern University, 2025
- Faculty Research Grant, Gender Institute, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, 2024-2025
- Junior Fellowship, Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2021-2022
- Dissertation Fellowship, Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, University of Chicago, 2021-2022
- The Phi Beta Kappa Prize, Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, Middlebury College, 2015
- Theodore S. Woolsey Prize for Outstanding Work in the Study of Sacred Texts, Department of Religion, Middlebury College, 2015
|
|
|