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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.  

Cladis recently completed his book manuscript, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination (Columbia University Press).  Radical Romanticism is a less romantic Romanticism: it is not so much focused on sublime vistas but rather on poignant human encounters and events that bring attention to the experience of war, empire, misogyny, white supremacy, environmental degradation, and oppressive political and religious institutions. Radical Romanticism is an intellectual tradition, an aesthetic tradition, a way of life. It seeks to cultivate perspectives, practices, and affect that bring dignity and justice to the human and the more-than-human worlds. It acknowledges beauty and cruelty, hope and despair, wonder and uncertainty, mystery and knowledge, weaving these intricately together, depicting life in times of personal and public crisis, and fortifying our means of personal and public transformation. Radical Romanticism's hallmark is to link the cultivation of the heart (character) and a public language (civic engagement) to address such disasters as climate change and white nationalism. Additionally, in 2024 the following appeared in print:  “The World in Ruins: Wordsworth, Du Bois, and Silko,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2022) 105 (4): 440–467, https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.105.4.0440 ; “Leslie Silko: Nuclear Landscapes, Environmental Catastrophe, and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling,” Ecokritike 1 (2024): 35-58; “Dancing on a Flaming World: Du Bois’ Religiously Inflected Poetry and Creative Fiction,” Journal of the Academy of Religion 91 (2023): 408–429 https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad078); and forthcoming: “The Black Ecofeminist Storytelling of Zora Neale Hurston,” Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities. He is currently writing a chapter titled, “A Durkheimian Environmental Social Theory” and another chapter titled, “Teaching Environmental Political Theory with a Dual Focus: The Cultivation of Dispositions and the Work of Institutional Change.” His new book project is titled, Just Home: Place, Belonging, and Justice.

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