Niki Clements

Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion with a courtesy-appointment in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University (Houston, USA). She is a specialist in the work of Michel Foucault, modern philosophy, and late ancient Christian asceticism (which come together in her 2020 monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self). On the basis of her research in the Foucault archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France since 2019 (the sixth collection of which she inventoried for the BnF in 2024), Professor Clements is completing two books that focus on Foucault’s last decade (1974-1984): Chez Foucault: Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality and Foucault the Confessor. These works trace a path through Foucault’s unpublished archives to both open the archives to other international researchers and explain the philosophical developments in his thought, notably through his engagement with the history of Christianity and ancient ethics.

A governing member of the Centre Michel Foucault, a 2024 invited researcher with the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (EHESS, Paris), an editorial board member for Foucault Studies, and the co-inaugurator of the Foucault Seminar at the American Academy of Religion, Niki Clements is also the co-editor of the volume Foucault’s Confessions with James Faubion and Daniel Wyche (Columbia University Press, under contract). She has published widely on Foucault, John Cassian, asceticism, gender, sexuality, affects and emotions, hermeneutics, cognitive neuro-science, and medical ethics. With degrees from Brown University (PhD, 2014), Harvard Divinity School (MTS, 2007), and Sarah Lawrence College (BA, 2003), Niki Clements’s teaching and service share her research attention to recognizing human agency and critiquing structural injustices.

During her stay in Strasbourg, upon invitation of 2020 USIAS Fellow Kirk Ormand, Professor Clements will be welcomed by collaborators in the Research unit Archaeology and Ancient History in the Mediterranean Area (ArcHiMedE) and will participate in the colloquium, “Women in/and invective in Greek and Roman Antiquity” on 27-28 May 2025.

^{Photo credit: Jeff Fitlow, Rice University 2024}