Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies

Overview

Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities. His work often pertains to the intersection of modern Western religious, political, and environmental thought, and it is as likely to engage poetry and literature as it is philosophy and critical theory. Among other things, this work entails attention to environmental justice and Indigenous ecology. W. E. B. Du Bois and Leslie Silko have become central to his work on radical aesthetics and storytelling (aesthetics and storytelling dedicated to truth and justice).  He is a founding member of Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB) and is an active faculty member in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown. He is the author of Public Vision, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 2003; paperback edition, Columbia University Press, 2006) and A Communitarian Defense of [progressive, social democratic] Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 1992), and over sixty articles and chapters in edited books. After receiving his doctorate from Princeton University, where he studied philosophy and social theory as they relate to the field of religious studies, he taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Stanford University, and at Vassar College where he served as Chair for six years. He arrived at Brown University in 2004 and served as Chair for several 3-year terms. He is the editor of Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2001) and of Education and Punishment: Durkheim and Foucault (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001). He has recently completed the book, In Search of a Course: Reflections on Education and the Culture of the Modern Research University.  He is currently working on the book project, Radical Romanticism: Religion, Democracy, and the Environmental Imagination.

Brown Affiliations

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