Mark Sydney Cladis

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, and it moves 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 chair of the Department of Religion for six years. He joined Brown University in 2004, serving multiple terms as department chair.