Biography

Before becoming a professor at the Ohio State University, Frederick Luis Aldama (nee Luis Federico Aldama) was born in Mexico City in 1969 to a Mexico-City born and bred chilango papa and a Guatemalan-Irish American mama. In a bizarre series of mishaps, he ended up growing up in and around Sacramento, California, and London, England, before going to UC Berkeley (BA) and then Stanford (PhD). Today, he uses the tools of narrative theory and cognitive science in his teaching and scholarship on Latino and Postcolonial literature, art, music, film, and comic books. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Brown on Brown, and the MLA-award winning Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. His latest book, Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach, (2008), brings a materialist/humanist approach to the study of translation, music, literature, law, for instance. Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez as well as A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction will be published in 2009. Along with Patrick Colm Hogan and Arturo Aldama, he is series editor of "Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture" with the University of Texas Press. He sits on the editorial boards of Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory and Narrative and Image. He is currently also Director of Latino Studies: http://latino-astudies.osu.edu/