Tony Day grew up in Washington D.C., received a B.A. (cum laude) in History and Literature from Harvard University in 1967 and a PhD in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University in 1981. In 1967-1969 he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Calapan, Mindoro Oriental, the Philippines, and from 1978 to1998 he taught Southeast Asian and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. In 2004-2005 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. From 2006-2012 he was a part-time visiting professor of history at Wesleyan University, Middletown CT.

Tony Day's publications include Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (2002); Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature (2002), edited with Keith Foulcher; Identifying with Freedom: Indonesia after Suharto (ed., 2007); and Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia (2010), edited with Maya Liem. He is currently Regional Editor for South East Asia Research. In August 2013 he moved to Singapore with his wife and youngest son.

Fluid Iron is the first extended treatment of state formation in Southeast Asia from early to contemporary times and the first book-length analysis of Western historical and ethnographic writing on the region. It includes critical assessments of the work of Clifford Geertz, O.W. Wolters, Benedict Anderson, and other major scholars who have written on early, colonial, and modern Southeast Asian history and culture. Making use of the ideas of Weber, Marx, Foucault, and postmodern and postcolonial theory, Tony Day argues that culture must be restored to the study of Southeast Asian history so that the state and historical developments in the region can be returned to their own "alternative" historical contexts and trajectories. He employs a wide range of contemporary scholarship, as well as Southeast Asian literary and historical texts, inscriptions, and temples to explore the kinds of concepts and practices--kinship networks, cosmologies, gender identities, bureaucracies, rituals, violence and aesthetics--that have been used for centuries to build states.Highly readable and accessibly written, Fluid Iron demonstrates that Southeast Asian state building has taken place in a part of the world that has always been a crossroads of cultural and transcultural change. Day urges Southeast Asians to learn more about the history of their own state formations so they can safeguard not only human freedom, but also the "incongruity" of their unique region in the years ahead.