Dayan is the author of eight books. Her literary history work includes a 1977 English translation of René Depestre'sA Rainbow for the Christian West and the 1987 book Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction, which discusses themes of knowledge and identity in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories.[4]
Her book Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995) reorients the study of Haitian history through what she calls "literary fieldwork". In the process, she recasts many boundaries: between politics and poetics, between the secular and the sacred, and between the colonizer and the colonized, those who deemed themselves masters and those who worked as slaves.[5]
Dayan has written multiple books which focus on animal rights issues and human-dog socialization as extended metaphors for imprisonment, racism and non-human personhood.[6] These works include The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007), pit bull fighting in The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011), and canine representation in media in With Dogs at the Edge of Life (2016).[7][8][9] Dayan has also written about pit bull profiling for publications such as The Conversation.[10]
Her memoirs In the Belly of Her Ghost (2019) and Animal Quintet (2020) use nature and animal imagery to evoke "the uncanny power of physical objects", framing her Haitian heritage and her childhood in the American South in the context of human treatment of animals.[11][12][13]