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Hillary Chute

Headshot of Hillary Chute

Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design

College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Arts, Media and Design

Hillary Chute’s work focuses on comics and graphic novels, contemporary fiction, visual studies, American literature, gender and sexuality studies, literature and the arts, critical theory, and media studies. She is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Harper, 2017). She is also associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), which won a National Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. She recently 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. She has written for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, The Believer, and Poetry. She was associate professor of English, and an associate faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago before joining the Northeastern faculty. Chute serves on the Executive Committee of Northeastern’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the The New York Times Book Review.

  • 100 Notable Books of 2018, New York Times Book Review, for Why Comics? 
  • Fellow, Wellesley Newhouse Center for the Humanities, 2016-2017
  • Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012-2013
  • Mellon Residential Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship, University of Chicago, 2012
  • Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 2007-2010

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Courses

Course catalog
  • Studies developments in British and (especially) American fiction in the twenty and twenty-first centuries.  Writers featured may include Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, Chris Ware, Thomas Pynchon, Jennifer Egan.