Hines Receives Aldama Award for Comics Leadership

Charlcee Cervantez || October 10, 2024

Hines and Aldama
Dr. Christian Hines (left) and Frederick Luis Aldama (right)

Dr. Christian Hines, an assistant professor of reading and literacy at Texas State University, has been awarded the Frederick Luis Aldama Emerging BIPOC Comics Studies Leadership Award. The prestigious honor recognizes Hines' outstanding contributions to the field of comics studies and her commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion in academia and comics-based community-led organizations and initiatives.

The Frederick Luis Aldama Emerging BIPOC Comics Studies Leadership Award honors an exceptional emerging BIPOC comics scholar who has demonstrated extraordinary service to the study of comics in academia and comics-based community/organizational initiatives. This prize seeks to support and honor the contributions of emerging BIPOC comics scholars whose labors are integral to the health of BIPOC comics studies, but whose leadership and service often go unrecognized. The award is generously sponsored by Dr. Frederick Luis Aldama, or Professor LatinX, the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Hines Presenting

By examining the ways in which these representations can shape the identity formations and affirmations of Black girls, Hines aims to create avenues for them to amplify and create their own multimodal stories. Her work also explores interrogating visual and multimodal texts to examine the intersectional lived experiences of diverse youth and the impact that youth have on society by participating in civic engagement and enacting resistance.

Hines, a former high school English teacher and teacher educator, specializes in the use of diverse young adult literature and multimodal texts in the secondary English Language Arts classroom. Her research focuses on the representations of Black girls in comics, literature, pop culture, and educational spaces.