Colin Dayan (a.k.a. Joan Dayan) received her B.A. summa cum laude, phi beta kappa from Smith College 
and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Before coming to Vanderbilt in 2004 as the Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities, she
taught at Yale University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, University of Arizona,
Princeton Univesity, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Her books include A Rainbow for the Christian West: Introducing René Depestre's Poetry (1977)
and Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (1987). Her book, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995, 1998), brings history, literature, and religion into dialogue through an examination of Haitian historiography and vodou. The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT Press, 2007) gives a legal history to the worst excesses of the current war on terror. Her articles have appeared in dozens of scholarly books and journals such as Research in African Literatures, World Literature Today, Raritan, Southwest Review, Yale French Studies, and The Yale Review. She is currently completing Held in the Body of the State (Princeton University Press) and The Law is a White Dog, a book length series of stories on the mechanisms of the law, spiritual belief, and the supernatural.

Professor Dayan received an NEH fellowship in 1985-1986 and a Guggenheim fellowship in law for her project on slavery, incarceration, and the law of persons. She was a Davis Center fellow in the Department of History at Princeton in 1990-1991 and a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton in 2000-2001.

"Words Behind Bars: Do prisoners have a right to read what they want?"
Boston Review, Nov/Dec 2007.