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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; 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—Judith Butler, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—drew upon Judaic texts, traditions, and tropes in order to critique and reimagine the relationships between truth, representation, and power, in dialogue with a set of canonical German-writing Jewish intellectuals and literary writers (Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka). 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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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 (esp. German and French)
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US Jewish literature and culture
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Rabbinic literature
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Holocaust history, memory, and representation
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Political, legal, and moral philosophy
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Modern Jewish thought and literature (esp. German and French)
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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).
- “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:
- “The Campus Does Not Exist,” Parapraxis 4 (Summer 2024): 40–47.
- “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.
Selected Recent Lectures and Presentations:
- “Censorship, Pornography, Palestine,” annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Boston, MA (November 2025)
- “Sibboleth: Colonial Monolingualism and the Poetics of Jewish Identity,” Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester (May 2025)
- “Framing Freedom,” Free Association: Free Speech? symposium, Pulsion Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics and the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, Brooklyn, NY (March 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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