Research 

My research turns to the law to answer questions around women's agency and identity in political theory.  I study these questions mostly with respect to property law, though I am also interested in the law of domestic violence.

My dissertation-based book project uses property law to construct new theories of women's agency. For much of American history, women’s property ownership was limited by coverture, a legal concept that supposedly prohibited women from maintaining an independent legal identity. In response to feminist thinkers who use coverture to perpetuate a myth about white women’s lack of agency, I propose two new forms of agency—covered and ugly agency. Covered agency explains how white women fought back against coverture in individual, everyday acts of resistance despite their lack of a formal legal identity. Ugly agency is the agency white women had to oppress others despite coverture, exemplified by white women’s active participation in chattel slavery. 

Historical scholarship and nineteenth century court cases to substantiate my new conceptions of women’s agency under coverture. I show that women illustrated covered agency when they bargained inheritance rights, wrote wills, or formed trusts, and showcased ugly agency when they participated in slave markets or litigation involving enslaved people. 

Berri, Allyson. "Uncovering the Role of Coverture in Hobbes’s Political Thought." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 51, no. 1-2 (2025): 66-90. (https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-05101004) 

• (Under Review): “Sexism Under the Civil Law: “Coverture’s” Norms in Nineteenth Century Louisiana.”

• “Women, Self-Defense, and Resistance in Hobbes’s Political Thought”

• “Policing Whiteness Through Perfect Victimhood: Bias in Illinois’s Domestic Violence Resentencing Law”