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Colin Dayan, is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches American Studies, comparative literature, and the religious and legal history of the Americas. She has written extensively on prison law and torture, Caribbean culture and literary history, as well as on Haitian poetics, Edgar Allan Poe, and the history of slavery. After receiving her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1980, she taught at Princeton University, Yale University, the City University of New York, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania.
After publishing A Rainbow for the Christian West, an introduction to René Depestre’s poetry and a translation of his long poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, she turned to early American literature and published Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction. Haiti, History, and the Gods reorients the study of Haitian history through what she calls “literary fieldwork.†In the process, she recasts many boundaries: between politics and poetics, between the secular and the sacred, and between the colonizer and the colonized, those who deemed themselves masters and those who worked as slaves.The Story of Cruel and Unusual, focuses on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and traces the precedents for the torture of detainees in the “war on terror.†Her most recent book, The Law is a White Dog, How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons was published by Princeton University Press in Spring 2011 and chosen by Choice as one of top-25 books for 2011.
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