Mark Sydney Cladis

Mark S. Cladis is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. His work explores the intersections of 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. the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Leslie Marmon Silko are central to his reflections on radical aesthetics and storytelling—forms of art and narrative devoted to truth and justice.

He is a founding member of Environmental Humanities at Brown and is an active faculty member in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown. He is the author of Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2025); In Search of a Course: Reflections on Education and the Culture of the Modern Research University (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 has also 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 chaired the Department of Religion for six years. He joined Brown University in 2004, serving multiple terms as department chair. He is also the editor of two collections: Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Education and Punishment: Durkheim and Foucault (Berghahn Books, 2001).