Iyko Day

Iyko Day is the Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race & Political Economy. She is also a faculty member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her work bridges Asian North American literature, Marxist theory, and settler colonial racial capitalism through interdisciplinary lenses.

Education:

• Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Berkeley
• M.A., Dalhousie University
• B.A., University of Calgary

Research foci include racial capitalism, queer of color critique, and decolonial anti-capitalism, analyzing how Asian migrant labor intersects with Indigenous dispossession and global solidarity movements. Her recent co-edited special issue Palestine After Analogy (2024) exemplifies transnational comparisons of colonial violence.

Scientific recognition includes the Meredith E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship (2023). She has held fellowships at University of North Carolina, Dartmouth College, and Kyoto University.

Day's 15 most recent publications explore themes across critical ethnic studies, feminist theory, eco-criticism, and visual culture, with a recurring focus on logistical failure, racialized debt, and settler colonial triangulation. Her 2016 book Alien Capital remains foundational in retheorizing settler-native-alien dynamics.