Project Collaborator

Samantha Frost

Professor of Criticism and Interpretive Theory University of Illinois

Biography

Samantha Frost is Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines how our ideas about embodiment shape our understanding of political subjectivity. She is the author of Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford UP, 2008), which received the First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. Frost co-edited, with Diana Coole, the volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke UP 2010). She also published Biocultural Creatures: Towards a New Theory of the Human (Duke UP 2016), which elaborates thinking derived from second discipline training in molecular and cellular biology made possible by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship (2010-11). Frost recently served as Faculty Fellow and Director of the Biohumanities Research Initiative (2016-18), a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (now known as the Humanities Research Institute). Her current project is tentatively titled The Attentive Body.

frost@illinois.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Digitally enhanced image of a path through a forest

Autonomy Is Not Freedom

Project Team:

Project Topics:

2025 – 2026

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Projects

Untidy Objects

A “living sculpture” on the University’s campus that includes water and vegetation is also a social intervention, prompting viewers to consider the fact that humans are the only living organism with legal and political rights. This project will introduce “augmented reality” technology to the...

Untidy Objects, which introduces emergent growth and multispecies co-mingling, is both a sculptural and political proposition. Since the advent of this multi-year installation, a living sculpture adjacent to the Logan Center developed in conjunction with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the ...

Project Team:

2023 – 2025

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