Deanna P. Koretsky
About
Deanna P. Koretsky is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College, where she teaches and writes in the areas of critical race, gender, and sexuality studies, popular culture, and literatures in English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Her first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism, shows how cultural representations of suicide inherited from the nineteenth century continue to reinforce antiblackness in the modern world. She recently completed an edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda (due out from Oxford University Press in 2025). Currently, she is writing about confluences of antiblackness, antisemitism, and settler colonialism in The Vampire Diaries franchise, part of a larger project on race and racism in the franchise under contract with McFarland.
Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, UNCF/Mellon, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other prestigious grants and fellowships. In addition to her solo work as a scholar, Deanna is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective.
Education
Ph.D. in English & Feminist Studies - Duke University
B.A. in English & Russian - Bucknell University
Scholarly Interests
critical race & gender studies
film, television, & popular culture
horror & the gothic
18th- & 19th-century literatures