Education

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

 

Biography

Dr. Koretsky’s research and teaching focus on literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critical race gender, and sexuality studies, and horror in literature, film, and television. Her first book, "Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism" (SUNY Press, 2021), examines how cultural representations of suicide inherited from the turn of the nineteenth century continue to reinforce antiblackness in the modern world.

Her current projects include an essay on the nineteenth-century novella, "The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo;" another on Black witches in "The Vampire Diaries," and a new edition of Mary Shelley’s "Mathilda" that reframes the text’s white feminism through a race-conscious lens.

In addition to her solo work as a scholar, Dr. Koretsky is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective and is part of several multi-institutional initiatives that stand to reshape how students, scholars, and the general public will encounter English-language literatures of the global seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries

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 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

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century literature; critical race, gender and sexuality studies; cinematic and literary horror; vampires, witches and mummies in literature, film and television

 

Publications

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

EDITED VOLUMES
Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, under contract with Oxford University Press.
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
“Romanticism, Race, and Gender/Sexuality,” The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, forthcoming.

(co-authored with Michelle S. 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 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

• 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

 

News