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Colin Dayan

Title: Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities

Department: English

Office: 319 Benson Hall
Phone: (615) 322-2175
Fax: (615) 343-8028
Email: colin.dayan@vanderbilt.edu

Personal Website

Curriculum Vitae

Research Area

  • Caribbean Social History and Literature (especially Haiti and Jamaica); early American religious and legal history of the Americas; Nineteenth-Century American, French, and English literary history; African-American Studies and American Studies.

Previous Positions

  • Professor, Department of English and Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, 2004-Present.
  • Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, 2001-2004.
  • Professor, Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania, 2003-2004.
  • Core Faculty, Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2002-2004.
  • Graduate Group in History, University of Pennsylvania, 2002-2004.
  • Professor, English, University of Arizona, 1992-2001; Regents Professor, 1998-2001.
  • Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and French, City University of New York Graduate Center, Comparative Literature, 1986-1990.
  • Assistant Professor, English, Yale University, 1981-1986.
  • Instructor, Romance Languages and Literature, Princeton University, Fall 1980.

Professional Honors

  • American Academy of Arts and Letters, elected fellow, 2012
  • Guggenheim Fellowship in law: 2004-2005 for project on slavery, incarceration and the law of persons.
  • King-Parks-Chavez Visiting Professor, University of Michigan, 2001.
  • Fellow, Princeton Program in Law and Public Affairs, September 2000-2001.
  • Fellow, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Study, Princeton University, 1990-1991.
  • NEH Fellowship, Social Science Research Council Fellowship, 1985-1986.

Publications

  • Books:
  • The Law is a White Dog (Princeton): http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9450.html
  • The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT Press)
  • Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995; paperback, 1998).
  • Fables of Mind (Oxford University Press, 1987).
  • A Rainbow for the Christian West (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).
  • Articles:
  • "Dead Dogs," Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/dayan.php
  • "Between the Devil and the Deep Sea," Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum July/August 2009
  • "Words Behind Bars," Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum (November/December 2007, at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.6/dayan.php)
  • "The Least Worst Place," London Review of Books (2 August 2007, at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n15/daya01_.html).
  • "Legal Terrors," Representations (2006)
  • "About Faith," Raritan (2006)
  • "Cruel and Unusual: The End of the Eighth Amendment," Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum (October/November 2005, at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.5/dayan.html).
  • "A Few Stories About Haiti, or Stigma Revisited," Research in African Literatures, special issue on Anniversary of Haitian independence, ed. Abiola Irele (2004).
  • "Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies," Materializing Democracy, eds. Dana Nelson and Russ Castronovo (Duke University Press, 2002).
  • "Ruses of Beneficence and Rituals of Exclusion," Workplace: A Journal of Academic labor (December 2000, at: www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/issue 4/contents22.html)
  • "Held in the Body of the State: Prisons and the Law," History, Memory, and the Law, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns (University of Michigan Press, 1999).
  • "Poe, Persons, and Property," American Literary History (1999).
  • "Paul Gilroy's Slaves, Ships, and Routes: The Middle Passage as Metaphor," Research in African Literatures (1996).
  • "Codes of Law and Bodies of Color," New Literary History (1995).
  • "Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves," American Literature (1994).
  • "Erzulie: A Woman's History of Haiti?," Research in African Literatures (1994).
  • "The Dogs," Southwest Review (2003); "The Photo," The Yale Review (2000); "The Blue Room in Florence," The Yale Review (1997); "Looking for Ghosts," The Yale Review (1996); "The Crisis of the Gods: Haiti After Duvalier," Yale Review (1988).

Miscellaneous

REVIEWS OF WHITE DOG

Conor Gearty, THES (Times Higher Education Supplement):
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=417133

Choice:

"[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come out in quite some time. . . . The Law is a White Dog is an innovative, highly intellectual book . . ."--Choice