Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. His work explores the intersections of modern Western religious, political, and environmental thought, moving fluidly among poetry, literature, philosophy, and critical theory. At its heart lies an enduring concern for environmental justice and Indigenous ecology. In recent years, the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Leslie Marmon Silko have become central to his reflections on radical aesthetics and storytelling—forms of art and narrative devoted to truth and justice.
Cladis is a founding member of Environmental Humanities at Brown, an active faculty member in Native American and Indigenous Studies, and his home department is Religious Studies. His scholarship, teaching, and collaborations often cross disciplinary boundaries, guided by a conviction that intellectual work is also ethical and imaginative work—an effort to reimagine community, land, and belonging. He is the author of Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2025); In Search of a Course (Pact Press, 2021); Public Vision, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 2003; paperback, Columbia University Press, 2006); and A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 1992). He is the editor of Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Education and Punishment: Durkheim and Foucault (Berghahn Books, 2001). Additionally, he has published more than seventy-five essays and book chapters.
After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton University—where he studied philosophy and social theory in relation to religion—Cladis taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Stanford University, and Vassar College, where he served as the chair of the Department of Religion for six years. He joined Brown University in 2004 and served multiple terms as department chair.
Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2025) is Cladis’s most recent book. It proposes a “less romantic Romanticism”—one less enchanted with sublime vistas and more attuned to human and ecological fragility. This tradition of thought and art turns its gaze toward war, empire, misogyny, white supremacy, environmental devastation, and the failures of various political and religious institutions. Yet it also preserves wonder, dignity, repair, and beauty. For Cladis, radical Romanticism is not simply a literary movement but an ethical and aesthetic practice: a way of living that links the cultivation of character with civic engagement, affect with action. Its aim is to nurture forms of care and imagination that addresses the intertwined crises of climate change, systemic racism, gendered violence, Indigenous dispossession, and resurgent white nationalism. In his words, radical romanticism “acknowledges beauty and cruelty, hope and despair, wonder and uncertainty, mystery and knowledge—woven together in the attempt to depict life in times of personal and public crisis, and to fortify our means of transformation.”
Recent and forthcoming essays extend these concerns. They include “The World in Ruins: Wordsworth, Du Bois, and Silko,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 105, no. 4 (2022); “Leslie Silko: Nuclear Landscapes, Environmental Catastrophe, and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling,” Ecokritike 1 (2024); “Dancing on a Flaming World: Du Bois’s Religiously Inflected Poetry and Creative Fiction,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91 (2023); “The Black Ecofeminist Storytelling of Zora Neale Hurston,” Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities, Volume 11, Numbers 2- 3, Spring-Fall 2024, pp. 112-134; and “The Presence and Role of Ancestors in Indigenous Cultures, Euro-American Cultures, and Democratic Intergenerational Dialogue,” Religions 2025, 16(5); https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16050649.
He is also contributing two chapters to edited volumes: “A Durkheimian Environmental Social Theory” and “Teaching Environmental Political Theory with a Dual Focus: The Cultivation of Dispositions and the Work of Institutional Change.” His next book project, Just Home: Place, Belonging, and Justice, explores how concepts of “home” shape our political and ecological lives—how belonging can either sustain exclusion or deepen our sense of shared responsibility. Across his work, Cladis returns to a few persistent questions: How might beauty and justice deepen one another? What can religious and poetic traditions teach about ecological belonging? How can scholarship itself become a practice of care? These questions link his writing to a wide constellation of thinkers and artists—from Durkheim to Silko, Rousseau to Du Bois, Wordsworth to contemporary environmental activists.
Through all these engagements, Cladis seeks to recover a mode of thought both critical and receptive, analytical yet open to complexity, ambiguity, and the lyrical. His work attempts to inhabit a space between despair and hope, drawing on the resources of democratic imagination to envision new ways of living together—human and more-than-human alike.
Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown
