M.A. Philosophy, Boston College 1955
M.A. English, Fordham University 1958
Ph.D. English, Fordham University 1963
James Finn Cotter received his Bachelor of Arts from Weston College in 1954 and a Masters in Philosophy in 1955. In 1958 he received a Masters in English from Fordham University and a Doctorate in 1963. His doctoral dissertation was "A Glass of Reason: Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella."
He taught in the English Department at Fordham from 1960 to 1963, and since 1963 he has been a professor in the Arts and Letters Division at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York.
Cotter has published Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh U 1972), a translation of the Divine Comedy (Element Books 1989 and Center for Italian Studies, SUNY Stony Point, 2nd ed. 2000) , and Beginnings, a history of the first 25 years of Mount Saint Mary College (1989), as well as articles on Dante, Chaucer, Sidney, Hopkins, Bridges, and J. D. Salinger, as well as articles on Medieval Illumination and Modern Poetry. He is a regular contributor to The Hudson Review and America magazine. He is the president of the International Hopkins Association.