Hillary Chute is a leading expert on comics whose scholarship aims to provide understanding of comics’ merged visual/graphic language as a literary form. A professor of English and art, media, and design at Northeastern, Chute was a visiting professor in English at Harvard for the Spring 2016 term. She is the author of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists; Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics; Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form; and associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus. Founder of the Modern Language Association’s Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives, she organized the 2012 Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference at the University of Chicago. Chute’s writing has appeared in publications including American Periodicals, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her latest work, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere, explores the history of comics, underground comics, and graphic novels while covering topics that include disasters, suburbs, and the Punk movement and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2018.