Dr. Sean A. Day, PhD was born in Jackson, Michigan. He began college at Indiana University, majoring in Music Composition, but eventually switched to Anthropology at Purdue University. He holds an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University. He founded the Synesthesia List, an international forum for synesthetes and synesthesia researchers, in 1992, while doing research towards his dissertation on synesthetic metaphors.
After receiving his doctorate in 1995, Day taught Linguistics at Purdue University for two years. In 1997, he took an Associate Professor position at National Central University, in Chungli, Taiwan, where he taught English and Linguistics until 2001; during this time, he continued to maintain the Synesthesia List from Taiwan.
In 2001, he moved back to the United States, taking a Visiting Professor position teaching Linguistics at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. In 2003, he took a position on the faculty of Trident Technical College, in Charleston, SC, where he now teaches anthropology. He was instrumental in developing the American Synesthesia Association into a nonprofit organization, assisted in organizing ASA conferences, and served as the ASA President from 2000 to 2016. A multiple synesthete himself, he has given talks about synesthesia in numerous different forums around the world, including in Taiwan, Russia, and Spain, and has been featured in documentaries on synesthesia presented in such countries as Australia, Ecuador, Japan, the Netherlands, and the UK, as well as in the US and Canada. His current research interests include music-related synesthesia, rare forms of synesthesia, and “synesthete ethnography” and demographics.