Samantha Frost is a Professor in the departments of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies, and an affiliate faculty in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a leading scholar in the field of new materialism and bio-humanities and has published several field-defining books and articles in these areas, overturning established understandings of politics, materiality, and culture. Her first book, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2008) was selected for the First Book Award by the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, 2009. Her co-edited collection of essays, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010) is widely considered one of the founding texts of new materialism. Her most recent book Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Duke University Press, 2016) proposes a new understanding of politics and the human.
