Campus Updates

Visit the campus updates page for information on Mount Holyoke's response to the global pandemic.

English

Iyko Day

Elizabeth C. Small Associate Professor of English; Chair of Critical Social Thought and Gender Studies

Specialization:

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

Iyko Day is Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College and Faculty Member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxist theory and queer of color critique. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016) and she co-edits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationalityfor Temple University Press. Her current projects examine the cultures of global Sinophobia; nuclear colonialism in North America, Africa, and Asia; and the aesthetics of racial capitalism.

Recent Campus News

A history of hate

Iyko Day, associate professor of English at Mount Holyoke, comments on the marginalization of Chinese immigrants and the spa shooting that targeted Asians.

Anti-Asian violence continues to grow

Iyko Day, Mount Holyoke associate professor of English, talks about anti-Asian hate in America on NEPM’s Connecting Point.

The rise of COVID-19 and anti-Asian bias

Mount Holyoke professor Iyko Day argues that the rise in anti-Asian sentiment is fueled by both current leadership and capitalist principles.

Calling out xenophobia in “China virus”

English professor Iyko Day explains the inherent racism in referring to the new coronavirus as the “China virus.”

Recent Grants

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

Was invited to participate as the Leslie Center William H. Morton Distinguished Senior Fellow in Fall 2020 Humanities Institute on Transnational and Decolonial Humanities: U.S. Ethnic Studies and Its Global Other at Dartmouth College Leslie Center for the Humanities.

Recent Publications

Day, I. (2022) “Eco-criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies.” After Marx: Literary criticism and the critique of value. C. Lye and C. Nealon (Eds). London: Cambridge University Press.

Day, I (2021). Exclusion Acts: Iyko Day on Asian Hate Through the Prism of Anti-Blackness. Artforum May 13, 2021.

Day, I. (2021). On Immanence and Indeterminacy: Black Feminism and Settler Colonialism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 39(1), 3-8.

Day, I. (2021). Ruin Porn and the Colonial Imaginary. PMLA 136(1), 125-131.

Day, I. (2021). Property Keyword. Amerasia Journal 46.2 147-48.

MORE>

Recent Honors

Invited Speaker, “Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” Geography Department Speaker Series, Rutgers University, April 8, 2022.

Keynote Speaker, “Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” The Failure of Knowledge/Knowledges of Failure Symposium, English and American Studies, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, April 22, 2022.

Jan Cohn Keynote Lecture, “Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” American Studies, Trinity College, March 10, 2022.

Invited Speaker, Dialogue with Minh Vu on Anti-Asian Racism, Asian American Studies, and Alien Capital. Asian American Cultural Center, Yale University, March 15, 2022.

Keynote Speaker, “Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure. ”Genealogies of Anti-Asian/Asia Violences Symposium, Moynihan Institute, Syracuse University, March 25, 2022.