Samantha Pellegrino
Writer (of many kinds)
I am an aspiring fantasy writer with a PhD in medieval Islamic alchemy who works as a development writer for museums.
Off the written word, I can be found reading boardbooks to my infant son, bouldering, scuba diving, knitting sweaters, baking cake, eating cake for breakfast, studying Catalan and dialectical Arabic, practicing the clawhammer banjo, and playing all sorts of tabletop roleplaying games.
I live on the shores of Lake Michigan with my spouse, our small child, a keeshond, and two very shy cats.
Writing
Fiction
I try to bring not only my knowledge of medieval Arabic magic, literature, and history into my fiction and worldbuilding, but also my experiences living in Morocco and Jordan, my Sicilian-Greek heritage, and my exploration of minoritized languages of the Mediterranean. My worldbuilding has a distinctive quality as a result, including quiet but firm political undercurrents influenced by contemporary Mediterranean and Middle Eastern issues. I love translation/translation studies and adaptations: often my writing projects begin with the desire to take a story I love in one form–whether that is a medium, a language, or a cultural environment–and to see how it changes when I modify it to inhabit another.
Academic Publications
"Historicity and New Directions in Jābirian Studies," IOSOTR 2021.
"The Gender of Magic: Constructions of nonbinary gender categories in Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan," postmedieval 2022
"Theorizing Artifice in the Jābirian K. ikhrāj mā fī-l-quwwa ilā al-fiʿl," Micrologus, forthcoming
"Magic," in the "Sea of Sorcery" roundtable, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, forthcoming November 2025
Nonfiction Publications
"Fountain Pen" in Storied Stuff: Show and Tell for Grownups, Volume II, edited by Steve and Sharon Fiffer, forthcoming October 2025
Development
I currently serve as the Assisant Director of Development at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, IL. Previously, I worked as a grant writer and researcher for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, ND.
I am passionate about public history and the role of museums in education. I am honored to contribute to the longevity, sustainability, and development of these institutions.
Academics
I hold a PhD in medieval Islamic alchemy from the University of Chicago Divinity School. My dissertation is titled, "A Womb of One's Own: Theorizing Artifice, Artificiality, and Technology in the Jābirian Corpus." I have taught at the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago. In 2023, I was the recipient of the Alma Wilson Fellowship Teaching Prize.
More broadly, my research interests include Jābirian texts and historiography; Islamic alchemy; Islamicate occult sciences, magic, and letterism; wonder and ʿajā'ib texts; fermentation, ectogenesis, and homunculi; art, artifice, and artificiality; medieval Arabic fictionality; and imaginations of gender (in both medieval Islamic alchemical texts and also in medieval Islamicate literature as it is mediated through the categories of the occult, the supernatural, and the magical).
Get in touch
spellegrino@uchicago.edu
Copyright 2013