Phillip Serrato

Phillip Serrato, Ph.D.

Phillip Serrato (B.A., M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Riverside) is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include gothic and horror studies, Chicanx literature, film, and performance, and children’s and YA literature. At the undergraduate level he teaches introductory surveys of children’s and YA literature as well as upper-division special topics courses such as “Cheesy Horror Cinema” and “Stranger Things.” At the graduate level he teaches seminars in Chicanx children’s literature, children’s gothic and horror literature and film, and the gothic literary tradition. He is currently at work on a number of research projects, including a book on gothic literature and media and another on Chicanx children’s literature

Select publications

“‘Lamento lo que va a ocurrir aquí’: The Place(lessness) of Youth in Mexico in Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Más negro que la noche” (in Horror Comes Home: Essays on Hauntings, Possessions, and Other Domestic Terrors in Cinema, ed. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper)

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Muchachito: Juan Felipe Herrera’s Downtown Boy as a Poetic Springboard into Critical Masculinity Studies” (in Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children's Literature, ed. Laura Alamillo, Larissa M. Mercado-Lopez, and Cristina Herrera)

“‘These are troublesome, confusing times’: Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak as Post-9/11 Gothic” (in New Directions in Children's Gothic: Debatable Lands, ed. Anna Jackson)

“Postmodern Guacamole: Lifting the Lid on El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera” (in Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama)

“‘What Are Young People to Think?’: The Subject of Immigration and the Immigrant Subject in Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit” (in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, ed. Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone)

“Transforming Boys, Transforming Masculinity, Transforming Culture: Masculinity Anew in Latino and Latina Children’s Literature” (in Understanding the Disenfranchisement of Latino Males: Contemporary Perspectives on Cultural and Structural Factors, ed. Pedro Noguera, Aida Hurtado and Edward Fergus)