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 received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004[2] and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
Her literary history work includes a 1977 English translation of René Depestre'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.
[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).