Frederick Luis Aldama


Frederick Luis Aldama is the , Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at The Ohio State University, United States. In the departments of English as well as Spanish & Portuguese, he teaches courses on and Latino & Latin American cultural phenomena, including literature, film, TV, music, sports, video games, and comic books. He is also an affiliate faculty of the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging. He is the author, co-author, and editor of thirty six books, including the 2018 International Latino Book Award and Eisner Award winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. He is the founder and director of the Obama White House Hispanic Bright Spot awarded LASER. In 2016, Aldama received the Ohio Education Summit Award for Founding & Directing LASER. He is founder and co-director of Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute at The Ohio State University. He has been honored with the 2016 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education's Outstanding Latino/a Faculty Award. Aldama is creator and curator of —a platform for accessible scholarly knowledge about comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world.

Biography

Aldama was born in Mexico City to a Guatemalan/Irish American mother from Los Angeles and a Mexican father from Mexico City. When he was a child, his mother moved the family to California. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1999.

Academic work and interests

Aldama uses narrative theory, cognitive science, and insights from Latinx & Latin American critical cultural theory in his teaching and scholarship on Latino & Latin American cultural phenomena: literature, art, music, film, TV, sports, video games, and comic books. He edits several book series, including the Contemporary Latinx & Latin American Profiles series with the University of Pittsburgh Press, the Global Media & Race series and Critical Graphics series with Rutgers University Press. He co-edits Latinx Pop Culture for the University of Arizona Press, the Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture and Studies for the Ohio State University Press as well as the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction for the University of Texas Press. He also edits the trade graphic and comic books series that showcase graphic novels, memoir, nonfiction, and more by Latinx writers and artists, including Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology. He is author of the forthcoming sci-fi graphic novel, 2041 and two children's book, With Papá and The Adventures of Charlie the Chupacabra. Aldama's fiction and graphic fiction has been published in Santa Clara Review and Pacific Review, as well as in book form with Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands. And, he is creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes in mainstream comics. He is co-founder and director of SÕL-CON: Brown & Black Comics Expo, the nation's only collegiate comic book expo that focuses on the work of Black and Latinx artists, writers, editors, inkers, pencillers, filmmakers and authors. He sits on the executive council of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and on the editorial boards for journals such as Narrative, "INKS: The Journal of Comics Society", and The Journal of Narrative Theory. He is a member of the standing board for the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies.
Aldama's articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in such journals as Aztlán, College Literature, Poets & Writers, World Literature Today, Cross Cultural Poetics, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, Lucero, Comparative Literature, The Callaloo Journal, Nepantla, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Analysis, American Literature, Latin American Research Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, SubStance, Style, ImageTexT, Latino Studies Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind, Alter/nativas: revista de estudios culturales latinoamericanos, Symplokē, Narrative, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Style, ELN, and Journal of the West. Interviews with Aldama have appeared in ABC News, PBS, Fox News Latino, CNN, VOXXI, MSNBC; Telemundo; Washington Post, Channel 10 news.
Aldama's featured interviews with authors "Interventions" appears quarterly in the American Book Review, where he is also an Associate Editor.
In 2017, Aldama published his first book of fiction, Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands. Aldama's current fiction has been praised by Pasatiempo as "pitched perfect for depicting marginalized lives.

Selected awards