The riches of Jewish Tradition to all and everyone.
Samuel Catlin
PhD
Irving M. and Marilyn C. Shuman Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Jewish Thought
Education
- 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
About
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.
"Auerbach's Abraham(s): Biblical Narrative and the Genesis of Critical Reading." Prooftexts (forthcoming).
"Text." In Sarah Hammerschlag, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2025.
"Real Women." Post45: Contemporaries, special cluster on "Suspicion," ed. Eleanor Russell (forthcoming Summer 2024).
"Lee Edelman's Lesson." Parapraxis 3: The Wish (Winter 2023–24).
"Death of an Author." Political Theology Network, forum on Susan Taubes's Divorcing (June 9, 2023).
"Rabbinic Exegesis (Midrash) and Literary Theory." In Naomi Seidman, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
"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 16.1 (June 2022): 53–77.