Hillary Chute

Dr. Hillary Chute (PhD, English, Rutgers) is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and has taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. She is the author or editor of seven books, including Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard University Press, 2016), Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Harper, 2017), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the recent collection Maus Now: Selected Writing (Pantheon, 2022). Chute was also Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, 2011), which won a National Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. She co-edited the Critical Inquiry special issue “Comics & Media” (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and in 2006 she co-edited the MFS: Modern Fiction Studies special issue “Graphic Narrative,” the first issue of a journal in the field of literature devoted to analyzing comics.

Her academic essays have appeared in journals including American Periodicals, PMLA, Profession, Twentieth-Century Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and many others. She has written for venues including Artforum, the Atlantic, Bookforum, Public Books, the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. At the New York Times Book Review she wrote the “Graphic Content” column reviewing comics, with co-columnist Ed Park, from 2018 to 2022. She is featured in the documentary “Disaster is My Muse: Art Spiegelman,” part of the PBS “American Masters” series, which first aired in April 2025. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities. In 2024 she won the CAMD High Impact Teaching Award. Chute serves on the Executive Committee of Northeastern’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.