• PhD, Department of Comparative Literature and the Divinity School, University of Chicago
• MA, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
• BA, Literary Studies, Middlebury College

Professor Samuel Catlin’s research and teaching interests span religion and literature; rabbinic and modern Jewish thought and culture; American cultural studies; Bible and biblical interpretation; secularism and the post-secular; literary and critical theory; gender and sexuality studies; and the intersections of religious, racial, and national identities, especially but not only in the United States. He is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled “The Rest is Literature: Judaism and the Institution of Literary Studies,” which traces the powerful but often occluded role of Judaic texts and traditions—and non-Jewish thinkers’ ideas about these—in the formation of the modern, secular academic discipline of literary criticism from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

Articles and Essays

“Death of an Author.” Political Theology Network (June 9, 2023).

“Rabbinic Exegesis (Midrash) and Literary Theory.” In Naomi Seidman, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023).

“Review of The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by Jonathan Freedman.” Reading Religion (September 30, 2022).

“Who’s Afraid of a Little Theory? A History of How One Term Became So Critical to American Conservatives.” Gawker (July 14, 2022).

“‘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.