Joan Dayan

Colin Dayan (formerly known as Joan Dayan) was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and lived most of her adult life away from the South until her return in 2004 to Nashville, where she is now professor of English and law and - with particular relevance for Nashville - Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, at Vanderbilt. She writes regularly for The London Review of Books, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Al Jazeera America.

Since arriving at Vanderbilt she has published four books: the first, THE STORY OF CRUEL AND UNUSUAL, looks, as its title hints, at the ways in which the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment has actually served to make certain types of precisely those kinds of punishments permissible and even acceptable in our society--even torture off the mainland, in Guantanamo. It came out in 2007 to a flurry of excited reactions. Her next book, THE LAW IS A WHITE DOG, took some of the ideas in that book much further. It looks at “How legal rituals make and unmake persons.” Colin took a number of legal cases and used them to build a fascinating exploration of how the law is used in this country of equals as a tool to create categories of persons who are most definitely unequal – inheriting an uncanny license to do this from such sources as the old slave laws, the so-called police power, and even medieval English law.

Colin’s book, WITH DOGS AT THE EDGE OF LIFE, appeared in 2015. This book is a mixture of genres, a unique experiment in interdisciplinary writing: it is law and philosophy, memoir and film criticism and much, much more. In it she tries to tackle the inexhaustible world of dogs and humans. She goes to Louisiana and Istanbul, Belfast and Mongolia, to say nothing of Atlanta and Nashville, Tennessee, to bring us accounts of humans and dogs, their interactions and their relations. “How can I seize on dog life in words?” she asks. It is at once erudite and imaginative as it asks why only some members of our species get to be persons, what so-called progress has destroyed, and whether an ethical life demands less humanity, not more of it.

IN THE BELLY OF HER GHOST, her memoir about her mother and the South appeared in 2018. As Deb Chasman, editor of the Boston Review, writes:

"With 'In the Belly of Her Ghost,' Colin Dayan delivers a haunted and haunting memoir of her mother, from a childhood in Haiti to a clipped life as a Southern belle. This is no ordinary family story: it is a lyrical telling of how racial terror and patriarchy reverberate in our most intimate relationships; it is about love aborted and love forged in violence and repression. As rejection, loss, and self-loathing simmer on the surface, this beautiful and desolate work recounts social harms and personal grievances. But it also bears witness to the persistent longing for connection that we carry with us and reminds us of what remains: an abiding faith that love can make you whole, even in death."

ANIMAL QUINTET: A SOUTHERN MEMOIR is forthcoming in December 2020. In these stories, Colin asks readers to examine assumptions from the perspective of other creatures, and to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, of thinking and loving.