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 These works trace a path through Foucault’s unpublished archives to both open the archives to other international researchers and explain the philosophical developments in his thought, notably through his engagement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 (see below).
Photo credit: Jeff Fitlow, Rice University 2024
International Colloquium - Women in/and invective in Greek and Roman Antiquity
From May 26, 2025 until May 28, 2025 | Collège doctoral européen, Strasbourg (FR)
The colloquium and a doctoral workshop are organised by Sandra Boehringer (Archaeology and Ancient History: Mediterranean-Europe - ArcHiMedE) and Kirk Ormand (Oberlin College, USA and 2020 USIAS Fellow), and are supported jointly by ArcHiMedE and USIAS.
More than twenty years ago, the eminent Classicist Alessandro Barchiesi observed: “No woman has ever made a name for herself in iambic poetry, except as a victim – and ironically as the perpetrator of the charter myth, Iambe.”1 But are women only the targets of these degrading, humorous, satirical or playful discourses? What do these female figures reveal about the world of the authors who inveigh against them? Have they themselves produced invective? And above all, what gender norms do these practices, considered to be ‘misogynistic’, reveal?
Research into women’s history, gender studies and history of sexuality in ancient world (from Foucault to Butler, from Pomeroy to the Eurykleia group) has since focused attention on other aspects of these discourses of invective and developed new analyses of well-known texts: far from being systematically described in a passive role, women appear, in various types of discursive practice, to deploy a genuine agency.
Taking into account the varied performance contexts (ritual, political, musical, and/or all three) of these invectives, and drawing reasoned parallels with contemporary issues (such as the reappropriation of the insult), the participants in this conference propose to explore the way in which the discursive practice of invective reflects, produces or, on the contrary, transforms gender norms in Greek and Roman antiquity.
The colloquium is proceded by a masterclass & doctoral workshop « Genre, sexualité et retournement de l’insulte. Comparaison triangulaire : Antiquité, Japon moderne, Occident contemporain », which will take place on Monday 26 May (13.30-18.00).
1 Barchiesi, Alessandro. 2001. “Horace and Iambos: The Poet as Literary Historian” 149. In Iambic Ideas: Essays on a Poetic Tradition from Archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire, ed. A. Cavarzere, A. Alone and A. Barchiesi, Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield.
