Samantha Frost

Samantha Frost’s contributions to the understanding of human development focus on the crucial connections between biology and psychology. As a professor in the Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies departments at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she has pioneered research in the area of epigenetics.

Her discoveries have provided key insight into how experiences (traumatic or otherwise) physically imprint human genes in real time. These groundbreaking perspectives have sparked new and exciting views on how the mind and body work together with the environment to create the entirety of human experience.

Frost’s work in epigenetics launched when she received a Mellon Foundation Grant to take 18 months of courses in molecular and cellular biology. Through funding from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (now the Humanities Research Institute), she became the director of the Biohumanities Initiative in 2016-2018. This interdisciplinary group explored the ways that biology and the humanities can collaborate to produce new research and perspectives.

Frost sees this work as a bridge between political and cultural studies and the life sciences (Personal communication 2019). Her research explores how our bodies physically respond to events, circumstances and our environments, including impacts on our genes. She aims to reimagine pre-established categories, such as agent and object, body and environment, and how relationships between these categories function. As a political scientist, she also considers how evidence of these changes can impact public policy.

Frost earned a B.A. Wellesly College in Wellesly, MA in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers in 1998. Prior to her time at the University of Illinois, she was an assistant professor at University of California-Santa Cruz from 1998 until coming to Urbana in 2000. Frost is the author of several books and essays on Post-Humanism and Hobbesian Political Theory.