Animal Quintet

About Dayan Colin

Colin Dayan is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Law. She studies American literature, Haitian historiography, and American legal scholarship—the focus of her two most recent books. In her 2007 book, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, she exposes the paradox of the eighth amendment to the constitution, showing that in the United States, cycles of jurisprudence safeguard rights and then justify their revocation. Her 2011 book, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, examines how the fictions and language of law turn persons—and other legal non-entities, such as slaves, felons, terror suspects and dogs—into “rightless objects.” The Law Is a White Dog was selected by Choice as one of the top 25 “outstanding academic books” for 2011. In her other work, she introduces an English-speaking audience to Haitian poet René Depestre’s early epic poem about the vodou gods and their journey to the American South. In Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (1987), she discusses Edgar Allen Poe’s fictional works as complicated critiques of the traditions of romance and the gothic. Professor Dayan is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.