Deanna P. Koretsky

About

Deanna P. Koretsky is a writer and scholar with a special interest in vampires and other darknesses in literature and popular culture. Her recent projects include a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and a forthcoming essay collection on race and racism in The Vampire Diaries franchise. 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. Her current work engages metaphors of vampirism to examine autistic ontology through the intersecting frames of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Deanna’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others. In addition to her solo writing, she is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective and occasionally pops into the Dear Vampire Diaries podcast. She teaches at Spelman College and lives near the “real” Mystic Falls.

Education

Ph.D. in English & Feminist Studies - Duke University

B.A. in English & Russian - Bucknell University

Scholarly Interests

horror & the gothic

18th- & 19th-century literatures

film, television, & popular culture

race, gender, & sexuality

critical autism studies