Niki Kasumi Clements

Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion at Rice University. Dr. Clements is an ethicist working on how humans can shape their lives through daily practices and come to critique the social, political, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that render humans differentially vulnerable to structural violence. Clements's first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self (2020), approaches these questions through the ethics of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), the late ancient ascetic whose views of human ability contributed to new forms of life in a shifting empire. Clements’s research for her second monograph, Foucault the Confessor, engages Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through both his published works and extensive archival work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Cassian features in Foucault’s posthumously published History of Sexuality, Volume 4, Confessions of the Flesh (2018, trans. 2021) which engages early Christian arts of living alongside confessional forms of subjection. Clements is currently finishing a short book, Foucault’s Final Confessions, which analyzes Foucault’s conceptual and methodological shifts to ethics over his last decade as he writes his History of Sexuality series. Inspired by her students and Foucault, Clements continues to learn and teach about mental illness stigmas, medical health inequity, and racist state-violence, establishing the conditions for their critique.