Iyko Day

Faculty

Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English
Affiliated Faculty, Critical Race & Political Economy
On leave, 2025–2026

iday@mtholyoke.edu

413-538-3222

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at ��챬��. She is also a faculty member in the Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016) and her essays have appeared in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Monthly Review, and PMLA as well as magazines such as Art Forum and Brooklyn Rail. She has coedited special issues for Critical Ethnic Studies journal, including “Palestine After Analogy” (9.1), and has edited forums in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies editorial collective. Her current research focuses on Marxist theory, colonial racial capitalism, and the visual culture of logistics.

Areas of Expertise

Asian American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Marxist Theory, Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonial Studies, Queer of Color Critique

Education

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

HAPPENING AT MOUNT HOLYOKE

Recent Campus News

Barbara Smith ’69, speaks with a student

‘Warrior’ alum delivers inaugural presidential lecture

Barbara Smith ’69 kicked off the inaugural lecture series bearing her namesake on her time shaping the Combahee River Collective and discussed the skills she developed at Mount Holyoke that helped her contribute to building Black feminism.

The entrance to Dwight Hall with the beloved beech tree in the courtyard

Putting race, economy and identity into sharp focus

Mount Holyoke has developed a new major in critical race and political economy to explore the intersections of power and identity that shape personal experience and the world.

Flanked by Interim President Beverly Tatum and Provost Lisa Sullivan, Katie Berry, Renae Brodie, Karen Remmler and Iyko Day received Faculty Awards.

Four faculty members honored for teaching and scholarship

In what has become a signature College tradition, four Mount Holyoke faculty members were honored for their scholarship and teaching at a March 2 ceremony.

More News

Recent Grants

Day, I. (2024) One Week Residency and Conference: “Crisis and Urgency: Scholarship in a Shifting World,” Japan Association for American Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.

Day I. (2021) Invited Fellow at the Asian American Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Fellowship is for six months.

Day, I. (2021) William H. Morton Distinguished Senior Fellow, Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College. Institute focus: Transnational and Decolonial Humanities: U.S. Ethnic Studies and Its Global Other

Recent Publications

Day, I. (2025). “Reading Red, Reading Palestine.” PMLA, 140 (2), 321-326.

Abourahme, N and Day, I (2024), Co-editors of “Palestine after Analogy,” Special Issue of Critical Ethnic Studies Journal 9.1

Day, I. (2024) “Haunted by Answers.” Guest Column in Daily Hampshire Gazette, online and print, Jan 9, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.gazettenet.com/Guest-columnist-Day-53579030

Day, I. (2024). “Crisis Infrastructures.” Forum essay on Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade. Critical Ethnic Studies 8.2

Day I. and Kono S. (2023). “Afterword.” Genbaku no uta—Poetry after the Atomic Bomb: A Collection of Tanka Poetry by Hideko Kono. Ed. Yumie Kono. Trans. Yumie Kono and Ariel O’Sullivan. Nagano: Mokuseisha Press.

Recent Awards

Day, I. (2023) Meredith E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship, ��챬��, March 2, 2023

Recent Honors

Day, I. Co-curator, Visual Kinship photography exhibition at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College. On view August 30-November 29, 2025.

Day, I. (2025) Invited Speaker, “Seeing in the Dark: On Pacharee Sudhinaraset’s Worlds At the End.” NYU Book Celebration Sponsored by Department of Postcolonial Race and Diaspora Working Group, Critical Race Anti-Colonial Co-Lab, and Asian/Pacific/American Institute, March 5, 2025.

Day, I. (2025) Invited Speaker, “Cruel Optimism in the Time of Genocide.” UC Davis, Re/Imagining Abolitionist Practices, Department of Asian American Studies, February 6, 2025.

Day, I. (2024) Plenary Address. “Settler Colonialism and the Ends of Analogy.” Dartmouth College, Summer Institute on the Futures of American Studies, June 22, 2024

Day, I. (2024) Invited Speaker, “Nuclear Power and the Waste Theory of Value.” Waseda University, Tokyo, Fifty-Eighth Japanese Association for American Studies Annual Meeting Program, June 2, 2024.