Deanna P. Koretsky

About

Deanna P. Koretsky is a literary and cultural critic, Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing at Spelman College, and a 2026-27 fellow in residence at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University.

Building on her training in British Romanticism, Deanna’s work approaches a wide range of literary and cinematic texts through the lenses of queer and feminist theory, Black studies, and critical neurodivergence studies. Her first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (2021), demonstrates how cultural representations of the suicidal creative genius routinize antiblackness in the modern world. She is currently developing her next monograph, Bad Blood and Monstrous Minds: The Racial Logics of the War on Autism, and co-editing, with Alex Milsom, a volume on AMC’s Interview with the Vampire / The Vampire Lestat.

Other publications include Mary Shelley’s Mathilda (2025), Demystifying Mystic Falls: Essays on Race in the Vampire Diaries Universe (2027), and over a dozen scholarly essays on topics from nineteenth-century British and Afrodiasporic literature to contemporary television and film. Beyond her solo work, Deanna serves as Associate Editor for Reviews at The Journal of American Culture and coordinates Spelman’s partnership with the Georgia Film Academy. She is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective and occasionally pops into the Dear Vampire Diaries podcast.