Frederick Luis Aldama is an American academic, known for this work as the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab, and Affiliate Faculty in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas, Austin, and Adjunct Professor & Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He teaches courses on Latinx comics, tv, and film in the departments of English and Radio-Television-Film. At the Ohio State University he was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher as well as recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. At the Ohio State University he was founder and director of the award-winning LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment Research and founder and co-director of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. Aldama is the creator and curator of the Planetary Republic of Comics. Early life and education Aldama was born in Mexico City to a Guatemalan- and 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 in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1999. Career Aldama is an author of fiction and comics as well as a scholar and professor who uses insights from narrative theory, cognitive science, and Latinx critical cultural theory to enrich understanding of the creation, distribution, and consumption of Latinx pop cultural phenomena, especially comic books, TV, and film. He is book series editor of the Latinx and Latin American Profiles (with the University of Pittsburgh Press) that publishes scholarship on innovative Latinx cultural figures, such as Reading Junot Diaz and Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi. He also edits the Global Media & Race and Critical Graphics series (with Rutgers University Press). He co-edits Latinx Pop Culture (for University of Arizona Press) as well as the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series (for the University of Texas Press). Aldama edits Latinographix, a comic books series that showcases graphic novels, memoir, and nonfiction by Latinx writers and artists, including Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology and United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel by Giannina Braschi and Joakim Lindengren. In 2017, Aldama