Associate Professor
On Leave
July 01, 2024 to June 30, 2025
CG 257
416-978-7068
Cross-Appointments
Department of History
Fields of Study
- Social, Cultural & Legal Theory
- Criminal Justice
- Legal History
- Law and Legal Processes
Areas of Interest
- Nineteenth-century British empire
- Histories of forensic science and medicine
- Law & society
- Colonialism and colonial governance
Biography
Professor Evans' research focuses on the history of criminal law in the British empire. She is the author of Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law (Yale University Press, 2021), a history of criminal responsibility, governance, and colonial liberalism told through homicide cases from across the British world. Her new book project, provisionally titled Where There Is Smoke: Law and Fire in the British Empire, considers the cultural and political dimensions of legal approaches to fire investigation and control in the empire from 1830 to 1914.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate
- CRI215: Introduction to Sociolegal Studies
- CRI345: History of Criminal Justice
- CRI365: Crime & Mind
Graduate
- CRI2140: Guilt, Responsibility and Forensics
Selected Publications
- Evans, Catherine L. “James Fitzjames Stephen, Digest of Criminal Law (1877).” In Leading Works in Criminal Law, edited by Chloë Kennedy and Lindsay Farmer. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2024.
- Evans, Catherine L., and Philip Girard. “Law and Empire, 1500–1812.” In The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 1: 1500–1820, edited by Carla Gardina Pestana, Eliga Gould, and Paul Mapp, 1:274–94. The Cambridge History of America and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- Evans, Catherine L. Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late-Victorian Law. Yale University Press, 2021.
- Evans, Catherine L. “Wondrous Depths: Judging the Mind in Nineteenth-Century America.” Law & Social Inquiry 44, no. 3 (2019): 828–49.
- Evans, Catherine L. “Heart of Ice: Indigenous Defendants and Colonial Law in the Canadian North-West.” Law and History Review 36, no. 2 (2018): 199–234.
- Evans, Catherine L. “At Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Criminal Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Britain." History Compass 14 (October 2016): 470-79.
Education
BA (History), McGill University
BA (Jurisprudence), University College, University of Oxford
PhD (History), Princeton University