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

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

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 Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT Press)
The Law is a White Dog (work-in-progress book-length series of stories on the mechanisms of the law, spiritual belief, and the supernatural).
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:
"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).