The Problem of Personhood

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of personhood has become essential-to debates about providing corporations human privileges, limiting access to abortion, giving algorithms free speech protections, releasing elephants from zoos, and permitting trees the standing to sue. The Personhood Problem reveals the unsettling connections between these imagined persons and their sought-after rights, in a bracing and nuanced examination of the versions of personhood proliferating today. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood, the book uncovers the unexpected, disturbing, and dangerous alignments between them. Telling the true and engaging story of the oldest version of “fictional” personhood-the corporate one-this book helps us rethink that history and its use, or threat, to us now.

Author Biography

Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA). Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was the Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, Volume D (1914-1945) (2022).