Samantha Pinto is Professor of English, core faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies, and affiliated faculty of African & African Diaspora Studies and The John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was previously Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Georgetown University. Since 2022, she has served as Director of the Humanities Institute at UT.

Her first book, Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, 2013), was the winner of the 2013 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA. Her work has been published in journals including Meridians, Signs, Palimpsest, Small Axe, Public Culture, Early American Literature, and MELUS, and she has received fellowships from the NEH and the NHC.

Her second book, Infamous Bodies (Duke UP, 2020) explores the relationship between 18th and 19th-century black women celebrities and discourses of race, gender, & human rights. She is the co-editor with Alexandra Moore of Writing Beyond the State (Palgrave, 2020); the co-editor with Jennifer C. Nash of a 2020 Feminist Formations special issue on “Teaching the Feminist Classics Now,” the edited collection Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (2023), and the Duke University Press book series "Black Feminism on the Edge," and a 2023 SAQ special issue on "Feminism's Bad Objects"; the special issue co-editor with Shoniqua Roach of a 2021 The Black Scholar special issue on “Black Privacy”; the current North American editor of Feminist Theory; and a former editorial board member of PMLA and current editorial board member of African American Review. Currently, she is at work on a third book, Material & Metaphor: Inside the Body of Black Feminism, on race, embodiment, and scientific discourse in African American and African Diaspora culture, and other book-length projects on feminist ambivalence and divorce.