Education

Ph.D., Duke University 
M.A., Bucknell University 
B.A., Bucknell University

 

Biography

Deanna Koretsky’s scholarship and teaching focus is on transatlantic literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critical race and feminist studies, and anti-racist pedagogies. Her first book, "Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism," examined how cultural representations of suicide inherited from the early nineteenth century continue to reinforce antiblackness in the modern world.

Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and UNCF-Mellon. Dr. Koretsky holds the title of Carnegie Corporation & Rockefeller Foundation Distinguished Research Scholar for the 2021-22 academic year and is also the recipient of Spelman’s 2021 Presidential Award in Scholarship.

A founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective, her current research interests include horror, early cinema, and post-Soviet immigrant identity. She is also part of two multi-institutional digital projects that stand to reshape how students, scholars, and the general public will encounter English-language literatures of the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Courses Taught

• Black Women in 19th-Century British Literature
• 19th-Century Horror Stories: Sex, Race, Gender, and the Gothic 
• Mary Shelley beyond Frankenstein 
• Law and Literature
• 18th-Century British Literature
• 19th-Century British Literature
• Introduction to Critical Studies in English
• Introduction to Literary Studies 
• First-Year Writing 

 

Research Interests

Transatlantic eighteenth and nineteenth-century literatures; critical race and feminist studies; film, television and popular culture; critical pedagogy; Russian literature and culture 

 

Publications

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

EDITED VOLUMES
Contributing editor, special issue of "European Romantic Review," forthcoming.

Co-editor, special issue of "Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations," vol. 23, no. 1 (Spring 2019).

RECENT ARTICLES

(With Michelle Hite) “Loving Blackness Across Arts and Sciences,” Early American Literature, forthcoming.

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

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

“The Interracial Marriage Plot.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 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, vol. 29, no. 4 (2018): 473-484.

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