Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion at Rice University, and for 2024 is an invited researcher through the DEA program of the FMSH/EHESS to continue her research collaborations in France. Clements’s research engages Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through both his published works and the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The posthumous publication of History of Sexuality, Volume 4, Les Aveux de la chair (2018, translated as Confessions of the Flesh in 2021) confirms the extent of his engagement with early Christianity and ancient sexual ethics as an art of living; it also confirms just how important the study of religion is for engaging Foucault’s work on subjection, alongside the possibilities for self-formation and challenges to structures of domination.
More broadly, Clements is an ethicist working on how humans can shape their lives through daily practices and come to critique the social, political, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that render humans differentially vulnerable to structural violence. Her first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self (2020), approaches these questions through the ethics of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), the late ancient ascetic whose views of human ability contributed to new forms of life in a shifting empire. Between 1977 and 1984, Foucault became particularly interested in Cassian as part of the genealogy of the desiring subject–and Sites reconsiders these readings through Cassian’s attention to embodied, affective, and inter-relational practices.
Influenced by her mentors at Brown University (Ph.D., 2014), Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S., 2007), and Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 2003), as well as her students at Rice, Clements’s teaching and service share her research attention to recognizing human ability and critiquing structural disparities.
Selected Awards & Fellowships
Chercheuse invitée, programme DEA, FMSH/EHESS (2024)
Chercheuse en résidence, Maison Suger (June-July 2024)
Finalist, George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, Rice University (2022)
Allison Sarofim Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, Rice University (2020-2021)
Individual Research Grant, American Academy of Religion (2021)
Finalist, Sophia Meyer Farb Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Teaching, Rice University (2019, 2016)
Faculty Fellowship, Humanities Research Center, Rice University (2017-2018; 2022-2023)
Award for Outstanding Service, Department of Religion, Rice University (2017)
Outstanding Faculty Associate Award, Jones College, Rice University (2017)
Distinguished Faculty Associate Award, Jones College, Rice University (2016)
Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion (2014)
Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2014)
Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow, Brown University (2013-2014)
Mellon Fellowship for the Summer Workshop on Cognitive Science/
Neuroscience and the Humanities, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2011)