• Samantha Pellegrino

    PhD Candidate in Islamic Studies

    University of Chicago Divinity School

  • Samantha Pellegrino is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation is titled, "A Womb of One's Own: Theorizing Artifice, Artificiality, and Technology in the Jābirian Corpus." She received an MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2017) and a BA with Honors in Religion and Linguistics from Swarthmore College (2015).

  • Academics

    Ms Pellegrino's dissertation, "A Womb of One's Own: Theorizing Artifice, Artificiality, and Technology in the Jābirian Corpus," explores how concepts of the artificial are theorized through artifice and human crafting in the Jābirian corpus, a collection of 8th-10th century Arabic alchemical, magical, pharmacological, and natural-philosophical texts. The dissertation engages new methodological tools to de-center historicity as the primary metric by which Jābirian writings are engaged and reconsiders the offerings of the Jābirian corpus to a broader history of science.

     

    More broadly, Ms Pellegrino's 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).

     

    Click here for her résumé

  • Teaching

    Ms Pellegrino was the receipient of the Alma Wilson Fellowship Teaching Prize in 2022-23, awarded to doctoral candidates in the Divinity School with a record of outstanding teaching for the design and teaching of a course in the University’s Undergraduate Program in Religious Studies. For her Alma Wilson course, Ms Pellegrino taught "Scientists and Artisans in the Islamic West" in the University of Chicago Study Abroad program in Marrakesh, Morocco, becoming the first graduate student to hold an Instructor of Record position in the University's Study Abroad programs. She has taught for the past two years at Loyola University Chicago, regularly teaching a course of her own design, entitled "Magic, Marvels, and Wonder in Arabic Literature".

     

    Ms Pellegrino served as an Inclusive Pedagogy Fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2020-21, and a Writing Intern prior to that. She has completed courses in Syllabus Design, Pedagogies of Writing, and Critical Pedagogy, and holds a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

  • Get in touch

    spellegrino@uchicago.edu