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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, gender and sexuality, and critical higher education studies.
In addition to academic journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, he writes regularly for wider audiences, in venues such as Jewish Currents, Parapraxis, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He is currently completing his first book, Judaism in Theory, which traces how twentieth-century philosophical, critical, and literary authors writing in English, German, French, and Arabic—some Jewish, some not—engaged with ancient and medieval Judaic texts and traditions in order to critique and reimagine the relationships between truth, representation, and power in post-Holocaust modernity.
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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Religion and literature
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Jews and Judaism, from antiquity to the present
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History and theory of interpretation
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Modern Jewish thought and literature
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US Jewish literature and culture
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Rabbinic literature
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Secularism
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The Holocaust
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Modern Jewish thought and literature
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US Jewish literature and culture
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Biblical and rabbinic literature
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Theoretical and political issues of canon, tradition, authority, reception, and interpretation
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Secularism and the post-secular
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Continental philosophy and critical theory
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Psychoanalysis, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies
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Critical higher education studies, history of US higher education, and the US "culture wars"
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Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
- “Auerbach’s Abraham(s): Biblical Narrative and the Genesis of Critical Reading,” Prooftexts 42.1 (forthcoming Autumn 2025).
- “Programmatology: Deconstruction, Canonicity, Antisemitism,” Literature and Theology (forthcoming Autumn 2025).
- “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: Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte 16.1 (June 2022): 53-77.
Selected Essays:
- “Parshat VeZot HaBerakhah,” Jewish Currents (forthcoming October 2025).
- “The Campus Does Not Exist,” Parapraxis 4 (Summer 2024): 40-47.
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“Death of an Author,”
Political Theology Network (June 9, 2023).
Selected Book Reviews:
- “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.
- “Lee Edelman's Lesson,” review of Lee Edelman, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), Parapraxis 3 (Winter 2024): 32–39.
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Review of Jonathan Freedman, The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), Reading Religion (September 20, 2022).
Recent Invited Lectures and Presentations:
- “Sibboleth: Colonial Monolingualism and the Poetics of Jewish Identity,” Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester (May 2025)
- Roundtable participant, “Unfree Associations: Academia, Groups, and the Law,” Free Speech: Free Association? symposium, Pulsion International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics and the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, Brooklyn, NY (April 2025)
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- 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
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