She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California in 2009. Her areas of specialization are 20th century Latin American literature and cinema. Cotrina is interested in interdisciplinary studies of aesthetics, ethics, technology, and consumer and popular culture. Her current project is an examination of how cinema spectatorship affected the definition of Latin American masculine identity in the novels La invención de Morel, A hora da estrela, and El beso de la mujer araña.