This interdisciplinary seminar asks how modern societies create powerful “artificial persons”—from Victor Frankenstein’s creature to chartered corporations and contemporary AI systems—and then struggle to control them. We read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein alongside legal, historical, and philosophical texts on corporate personhood, technological responsibility, and algorithmic governance. We will ask: When does creation entail responsibility? What happens when “man-made monsters” acquire autonomy, rights, or market power? And how should law, ethics, and democratic politics respond? We also examine how philosophers, legal theorists, and political thinkers since the early modern period have characterized the distinctive agency and personality of collective entities like states and corporations, and the implications of ideas of personhood for contemporary understandings of the role of states in the world, the power of corporations, and the significance of AI for modern politics. To what extent does AI pose new challenges for existing understandings of personhood, rights, responsibility, liability, moral agency, and the human?