Deanna P. Koretsky

About

Deanna P. Koretsky is a scholar of literature and popular culture, Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing at Spelman College, and, in 2026-27, a faculty fellow in residence at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. She is currently developing her second monograph, tentatively entitled Bad Blood and Monstrous Minds: The Racial Logics of the War on Autism. She is also co-editing a volume on AMC’s Interview with the Vampire / The Vampire Lestat.

Deanna’s publications include Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (2021), 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 ranging from eighteenth-century literature to contemporary television and film.

Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, UNCF/Mellon, 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 also serves as reviews editor for The Journal of American Culture and coordinates Spelman’s partnership with the Georgia Film Academy.