Samantha Frost

frost@uiuc.edu

Research Assistant Professor of Communications

Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Primary areas of interest: modern, contemporary, and feminist political theory; feminist theory and gender studies; queer theory.

Professor Frost draws on canonical and contemporary Western political theory and philosophy to explore how our figuration of the body shapes the way we think about ethics and politics. She is interested in elaborating the ways in which materialist conceptions of subjectivity offer alternative critical perspectives on ethical practice and political life. Her research explores issues such as philosophical representations of thinking, willing, and action; the relationship between ethics and politics; the significance of gesture, body language, and attitude in ethical and political life; and the ways in which struggles for cultural intelligibility and political recognition form the very fabric of civil society. In her current work, she addresses these issues through an examination of the writings of seventeenth-century political theorist Thomas Hobbes.

The courses Professor Frost teaches are an amalgam of political theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, and philosophy, and they explore such topics as language, representation, and politics; the relationship between ethics and politics; French feminist theory; conceptions of the body and political subjectivity; the effect of identity norms upon our political concepts and theories; and the conceptualization of the relationship between power and desire in debates about sexual politics.

Ph.D., Political Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.