Colin Dayan | |
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Born | 1949 (age 75–76) Atlanta |
Other names | Joan Dayan |
Occupation(s) | Writer, academic, scholar, researcher, essayist |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Vanderbilt University |
Website | colindayan |
Colin Dayan FAAAS (born 1949),also known as Joan Dayan,is Professor Emerita,the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, [1] 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. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 [2] and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. [3]
After receiving her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1980,she taught at Princeton University,Yale University,the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,Queens College of the City University of New York,the University of Arizona,and the University of Pennsylvania.
Dayan is the author of eight books. Her literary history work includes a 1977 English translation of RenéDepestre's A Rainbow for the Christian West and the 1987 book Fables of Mind:An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction,which discusses themes of knowledge and identity in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. [4]
Her book Haiti,History,and the Gods (1995) 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. [5]
Dayan has written multiple books which focus on animal rights issues and human-dog socialization as extended metaphors for imprisonment,racism and non-human personhood. [6] These works include The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007),pit bull fighting in The Law Is a White Dog:How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011),and canine representation in media in With Dogs at the Edge of Life (2015). [7] [8] [9] Dayan has also written about pit bull profiling for publications such as The Conversation. [10]
Her memoirs In the Belly of Her Ghost (2019) and Animal Quintet (2020) use nature and animal imagery to evoke "the uncanny power of physical objects",framing her Haitian heritage and her childhood in the American South in the context of human treatment of animals. [11] [12] [13]
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 [2] and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. [3]
Pit bull is an umbrella term for several types of dog believed to have descended from bull and terriers. In the United States,the term is usually considered to include the American Pit Bull Terrier,American Staffordshire Terrier,American Bully,Staffordshire Bull Terrier,and sometimes the American Bulldog,along with any crossbred dog that shares certain physical characteristics with these breeds. In other countries,including the United Kingdom,the term is used as an abbreviation of the American Pit Bull Terrier breed specifically,while the Staffordshire Bull Terrier is not considered a pit bull. Most pit bull–type dogs descend from the British bull and terrier,a 19th-century dog-fighting type developed from crosses between the Old English Bulldog and the Old English Terrier.
Amy Hempel is an American short story writer and journalist. She teaches creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers.
Wayne Koestenbaum is an American artist,poet,and cultural critic. He received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2020. He has published over 20 books to date.
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation,the Language of Physical Pain,and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art,Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Sarah Edwards Charlesworth was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation,a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s,all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns:The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste:The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
A Fable for Critics is a book-length satirical poem by American writer James Russell Lowell,first published anonymously in 1848. The poem made fun of well-known poets and critics of the time and brought notoriety to its author.
Talking animals are a common element in mythology and folk tales,children's literature,and modern comic books and animated cartoons. Fictional talking animals often are anthropomorphic,possessing human-like qualities. Whether they are realistic animals or fantastical ones,talking animals serve a wide range of uses in literature,from teaching morality to providing social commentary. Realistic talking animals are often found in fables,religious texts,indigenous texts,wilderness coming of age stories,naturalist fiction,animal autobiography,animal satire,and in works featuring pets and domesticated animals. Conversely,fantastical and more anthropomorphic animals are often found in the fairy tale,science fiction,toy story,and fantasy genres.
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California,Irvine,where she teaches Literary Journalism. Wilentz received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir,Farewell,Fred Voodoo:A Letter from Haiti,as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz is The New Yorker's former Jerusalem correspondent and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Cropping is the removal of part or all of the external flaps of an animal's ear. The procedure sometimes involves bracing and taping the remainder of the ears to train them to point upright. Almost exclusively performed on dogs,it is an old practice that was once done for perceived health,practical or cosmetic reasons. Veterinary science states there is no medical or physical advantage to the animal from the procedure,leading to concerns of animal cruelty over performing unnecessary surgery on animals. In modern times,cropping is banned in many nations,but is still legal in a limited number of countries. Where permitted,it is seen only in certain breeds of dog,such as pit bull and bull terrier type breeds,the Doberman Pinscher,Schnauzer,Great Dane,Boxer and Cane Corso.
During a 1983 family vacation,American businessman and future politician Mitt Romney drove 12 hours with his dog on top of the car in a windshield-equipped carrier. This incident became the subject of negative media attention and political attacks on Romney in both the 2008 and the 2012 presidential elections.
Robin Fleming is an American medievalist and a professor of history at Boston College. She is the president of the Medieval Academy of America and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She has written several books focusing on the people of Roman Britain and early medieval Britain,using both archaeological evidence and written records.
Jennifer Skiff is an American author,journalist and television producer,best known for writing inspirational books and animal welfare diplomacy.
Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist,philosopher,and writer. She currently has a loose affiliation with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities,University of Colorado Denver,but is mostly independent,focussing on writing. Early in her career,her research primarily addressed ethical questions about healthcare and the environment. Since the 2000s,however,much of her work has focused on animal ethics. She has published twelve books,including multiple collaborations with the ecologist Marc Bekoff.
Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California,Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies,and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. She is more recently credited with revising the racialized history of American poetics,as the poet Terrance Hayes writes,“If there is a kind of ‘poet’s poet,’might there also be a kind of ‘poet’s scholar,’someone a poet reads for lucid,explosive doses of insight and history? Yes:Virginia Jackson. Actually,she’s more than a poet’s favorite scholar,she is a poet’s favorite pathfinding detective. Her brilliant Before Modernism is a radical reorientation of American lyric literary assumptions. Virginia Jackson unearths the overlooked,undervalued Black poets at the root of modern American poetry,and every branch of contemporary poetry trembles with new fruit.”Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry,the history of American poetry,comparative literature,lyric theory,the history of criticism,the history of poetics,and genre theory.
Hadriana in All My Dreams is a 1988 novel by Haitian author RenéDepestre. Set in Jacmel,Haiti,and spanning a period of 40 years,the plot follows a young French woman,Hadriana Siloé,who is turned into a zombie on her wedding day. The novel explores themes of colonialism,exile,and sexuality.
Alexandra Horowitz is a Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor within the English and Psychology Departments at Barnard College. Horowitz is the director of the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller,Inside of a Dog:What Dogs See,Smell,and Know,which introduced the idea of understanding the umwelt,or self-world,of dogs.
Haiti,History,and the Gods is a 1995 book by Colin Dayan that studies the history,culture,and religious practices of Haiti. Dayan focuses on the complexities and ambiguities often omitted from traditional historical accounts. Using a wide range of previously untranslated and overlooked sources,including historical texts,legal documents,and vodou rituals,Dayan reconstructs the cultural and spiritual landscape of both French Saint-Domingue and modern Haiti. The book presents vodou and narrative fiction as alternative archives of historical knowledge,offering new insights into the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath.
With Dogs at the Edge of Life is a book by American legal scholar and academic Colin Dayan,published by Columbia University Press in 2015. The book tackles the complex relationships between humans and dogs,and explores the themes of ethics,politics,and trans-species engagement. Drawing on memoirs,case law,and film,Dayan investigates the shared histories and struggles of dogs and humans,challenging established views of liberal humanism and offering new perspectives on suffering,violence,and empathy. By following the lives of dogs in different global contexts,the book rethinks how we live alongside non-human animals in the 21st century.
The Law Is a White Dog:How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons is a 2011 book by legal scholar and cultural critic Colin Dayan. The work explores the ways in which the law constructs and deconstructs identities,particularly focusing on marginalized individuals and entities such as slaves,prisoners,felons,animals,and even supernatural figures. Dayan draws on a range of legal,historical,and literary sources to examine how legal systems and practices have historically been used to deny personhood and enforce dehumanization,tracing connections from medieval English laws to modern abuses in Supermax and Guantánamo prison. The book sheds light on the legal mechanisms that sustain societal exclusion and cruelty,revealing how civil society often marginalizes and represses through legal rituals. The book was named one of the top 25 academic books of 2011 by Choice.