Deanna Koretsky, Ph.D.

Biography

Deanna Koretsky, Ph.D. has been a Faculty Member Since 2015 and is an Associate Professor of English.

Dr. Koretsky is Spelman’s resident vampirologist. Her research and teaching focus on critical race, queer, and feminist approaches to horror, film and television history and theory, and literatures in English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (2021), examines how cultural representations of suicide inherited from the turn of the nineteenth century continue to reinforce antiblackness in the modern world. Current projects include an edited volume on race and racism in The Vampire Diaries franchise, as well as a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda. In addition to her solo work as a scholar, Dr. Koretsky is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective.

Deanna P. Koretsky

Courses Taught

• Ph.D., Duke University, English and Feminist Studies

• M.A., Bucknell University, English

• B.A., Bucknell University, English and Russian

Courses Taught

• ENG 412B: 19th-Century Horror Stories: Sex, Race, Gender, and the Gothic

• ENG 416: Mary Shelley beyond Frankenstein

• ENG 436C: Law and Literature

• ENG 362: Feminist Film Criticism

• ENG 361: Cinema Literacies

• ENG 327: 19th-Century British Literature

• ENG 326: Black Women in 19th-Century British Literature

• ENG 317: 18th-Century British Literature

• ENG 285: Introduction to Critical Studies in English

• ENG 280: Introduction to Literary Studies

• ENG 103: First-Year Writing

Research Interests

Popular culture, film, and television; horror and the gothic; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; fandom studies; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures

Select Publications

MONOGRAPH

Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism. SUNY Press, 2021.

EDITED VOLUMES

Demystifying Mystic Falls: Race and Racism in The Vampire Diaries Franchise, in progress.

Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, in progress.

Contributing editor, special issue of European Romantic Review, 32, no. 5-6 (2021).

Co-editor, “New Directions in Transatlantic Romanticisms,” special issue of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 23, no. 1 (Spring 2019).

SELECT ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS

“Whitewashing the AfroAsian Vampire: Anti-Blackness and Filipino Erasure in The Originals,” in progress.

“Mystic Falls in Covington, GA: Gender, Race, and Fandom in The Vampire Diaries Franchise,” The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, forthcoming.

“Bonnie Bennett, Final Girl,” Black Witches and Queer Ghosts: Disrupting Norms in Supernatural Teen Serials, forthcoming.

“Vampire, All Too Human: Afropessimism, Queer Negativity, and the Limits of Romanticism in The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo,” The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, forthcoming.

(co-authored with Michelle S. Hite) “Loving Blackness Across Arts and Sciences,” Early American Literature, 57, no. 3 (2022): 827-834.

“The Uses and Limits of Archives in Decolonial Curricula,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 49 (2020): 147-151.

(co-authored with Joel Pace) “Introduction: New Directions in Transatlantic Romanticisms,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 23, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 5-19.

(co-authored with The Bigger Six Collective) “Coda: From Coteries to Collectives.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 23, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 139-140.

“The Interracial Marriage Plot: Suicide and the Politics of Blood in Romantic-era Women’s Fiction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 51, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 1-18.

“Boundaries Between Things Misnamed: Social Death and Radical (Non-) Existence in Frederick Douglass and Lord Byron.” European Romantic Review 29, no. 4 (2018): 473-484.

“Habeas Corpus and the Politics of Freedom: Slavery and Romantic Suicide.” Essays in Romanticism 22, no. 1 (2015): 21-33.

“Unhallowed arts: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide.” European Romantic Review 26, no. 2 (February 2015): 241-260.

“Sarah Wesley, British Methodism, and the Feminist Question, Again.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 223-237.

Awards

Candace Benefiel Commitment to Vampire Scholarship Award, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Vampire Studies Area, 2023

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Vampire Studies Area Stake & Cross Award for Best Critical Analysis, 2022

Carnegie Corporation & Rockefeller Foundation Distinguished Research Scholar, 2021-22

Presidential Award in Scholarship, Spelman College, 2021

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Award, 2021

UNCF-Mellon Faculty Development Grant, 2019

National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant, 2018-19

Faculty Development Grant, Spelman College, 2018

Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Duke University, 2015

Lore Metzger Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper, International Conference on Romanticism, 2014

Outstanding Graduate Student Paper, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, 2014

Duke TIP Research Fellowship, Duke University, 2013.

William Preston Few Summer Research Fellowship, Duke University, 2012

Summer Research Fellowship, Bucknell University, 2008

Fulbright-Hays Heritage Speakers Study and Research Grant, University of Pittsburgh/Moscow State University (Russia), 2005