Colin Dayan is Professor Emerita at Vanderbilt University. She works in prison law; the legal and religious history of the Americas; nineteenth-century American, French and English literary history; Caribbean Literature; and African American Studies. The recipient of numerous awards including Danforth, NEH and Guggenheim fellowships, she has written for The Yale Review, New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, the London Review of Books, Boston Review, and other publications.  She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.