Hillary Chute is a Cambridge native, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. She was previously a Professor at the University of Chicago. She is a renowned scholar focusing on the significance of the graphic narrative, comics, and other innovative combinations of art and literary forms, including the path breaking Barefoot Gen series about life in Hiroshima in the aftermath of the A-bomb.

Professor Chute is interested in the relationships between word and image, fiction and nonfiction that seen in contemporary comics, as well as gender studies. She was Associate Editor of MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), a book by Art Spiegelman, author of famous graphic novel Maus.

Her new book, Disaster Drawn, investigates hand-drawn comics coming of age as a respected medium for grappling with history and investigates the numerous ways graphic narratives document the horrors of war.