Areas of Expertise

Canadian and Latinx cinema; exploitation films; narco-cultural studies; modern and contemporary hemispheric literature; celebrity studies.

Teaching Interests

First-Year Writing.

Research

Ryan Rashotte has a scholarly passion for wonderful literature and unlovable films. His first book, Narco Cinema: Sex, Drugs, and Banda Music in Mexico’s B-Filmography, provides a comprehensive study of a low-budget cross-border cinema that has been instrumental in shaping narco-culture in Mexico and the US borderlands. He is currently working on a monograph that examines notions of sovereignty in Canadian exploitation films.

Representative Publications

“Myth, Force, and the Burden of Prestige: Narcos: Mexico as Case Study.” Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. University of Arizona Press, 2022.

“Soft-Core Sovereignty: Absorbing Canada’s Doukhobors in The Naked Flame (1964).” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2022, pp. 49-73, 2022.

“Good Gringos, Bad Hombres: The Postlapsarian Films of Mel Gibson.” The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex, and Latin American Culture. Routledge, 2018.

“Narco Cultura.” The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture. Routledge, 2016.

“Placing Agency in the Cultural Landscapes of La Mordida.” Malcolm Lowry’s Poetics of Space. Eds. Richard Lane and Miguel Mota. University of Ottawa Press, 2016.

Narco Cinema: Sex, Drugs, and Banda Music in Mexico’s B-Filmography. Palgrave, 2015.

Education

2012
Ph.D., English Literature, University of Guelph
2005
M.A., English Literature, York University
2002
B.A., English Literature, University of Toronto