Evelyn Atkinson

Evelyn Atkinson is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, "American Frankenstein: Creating the Corporate Constitutional Person," combines legal and social history to trace the development of the constitutional law of corporate personhood in the nineteenth century United States. Situating corporate personhood within the broader history of rights-claiming, this dissertation exposes the interrelationship between corporate personhood and race in the creation of seminal constitutional law doctrine that applied not just to corporations, but to individuals as well.  It also illuminates the dual nature of the corporation as both a "creature of the state" and a private market actor, tracing how arguments about the nature of corporate personhood made at the local level filtered up through the legal system.  Evelyn received her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College.  Her work has been featured/is forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review, Law & Social Inquiry, the Journal of the Civil War Era, Law & History Review, the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, and the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, as well as in various online forums.