Donald Ault (Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, the University of Chicago) is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley and at Vanderbilt University. Since 1971 He has been regularly teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in comics and visual narrative theory. He is the author of Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton (1974) and Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake's The Four Zoas (1987) and co-editor of Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method (1987). From 1983-98 he served as academic consultant and contributor to The Carl Barks Library.

His work has appeared in Studies in Romanticism, Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Wordsworth Circle, and The Keats-Shelley Journal, as well as various essay collections, most recently in Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (proceedings of the 1998 Copenhagen Comics & Culture conference). He was executive producer and editorial supervisor of the 1996 video production The Duck Man: An Interview with Carl Barks. He is currently completing several books: "The Comic Vision of Carl Barks," " Carl Barks: Conversations " (a chronological collection of interviews with Barks), "The Urizen Equations" (in collaboration with Chris B. Schaffer, Ph.D., Physics, Harvard University, and currently Post-doctoral Fellow, Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego), "Holograph(em)ic Singularities" (on visual narrative theory), and a book on comics theory.

This past summer, he taught a course in international comics at the Institute for American Universities at Aix-en-Provence, France, and in November he was plenary speaker at a seminar on Carl Barks for the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics held at the Lahti Institute of Design in Finland.