Deanna P. Koretsky

About

Deanna P. Koretsky is a scholar of literature, film, and television. As an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Spelman College, she teaches in the areas of critical race, gender, and sexuality studies, cinematic and literary horror, and literatures in English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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. She recently completed a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and is currently completing a project on race and racism in The Vampire Diaries franchise. Her next monograph, tentatively entitled The Vampire’s Reflection, engages the vampire metaphor to posit an autistic theory of being that is irreducible to Western conceptions of the subject.

Dr. Koretsky's research 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 work as a scholar, she is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective and occasionally pops into the Dear Vampire Diaries podcast.

Education

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

B.A. in English & Russian - Bucknell University

Scholarly Interests

race, gender, & sexuality

horror & the gothic

film, television, & popular culture

18th- & 19th-century literatures

critical autism studies