Catherine Evans

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.