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 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 on topics from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature to contemporary television and film. She is currently developing her second monograph.

Beyond her solo writing, 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.