Deanna P. Koretsky

About

Deanna P. Koretsky is an associate professor in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing at Spelman College and a visiting scholar in residence at Emory University (2026-27).

Her first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (2021), demonstrates how cultural representations of the suicidal creative genius inherited from the Romantics continue to routinize antiblackness in the modern world. 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.

With support from the American Council of Learned Societies and UNCF/Mellon, she is developing a second monograph. She has previously held major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others.