Samantha Frost

Samantha Frost portrait

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.

According to the CDC: “Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.”

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.

  • David Kinley Hall – Home to the departments of Economics and Political Science, where Frost conducts her research.

Frost, S. (2020). Attentive Bodies: Epigenetic Processes and Concepts of Human Being. In Dess, N. K. (Ed.), A Multidisciplinary Approach to Embodiment: Understanding Human Being. (pp. 35-39). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429352379.

Samantha L. Frost. (n.d.). Illinois Experts. https://experts.illinois.edu/en/persons/samantha-l-frost.

Samantha L. Frost. (n.d.). University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. https://criticism.illinois.edu/directory/profile/frost.

What is Epigenetics? (2022, August 15). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm.

Contributors: Gregory Dustin Farris