Colin Dayan is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Her fields of research and writing include Caribbean Social History and Literature (especially Haiti and Jamaica); early American religious and legal history; nineteenth-century American, French, and English literary history; African-American Studies and American Studies. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including, most recently: Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995), The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT Press, 2007), and The Law Is a White Dog (Princeton University Press, forthcoming