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. For 2024 she is an invited researcher through the DEA program of the FMSH/EHESS and for 2025 she is an invited research through L’Institut d’études avancées de l’université de Strasbourg to continue her research collaborations in France. In 2024, Clements was elected a governing member for the Centre Michel Foucault, and also serves on the editorial board for Foucault Studies.
A specialist of Foucault’s last decade through the BnF archives, Clements is finishing Chez Foucault: Histories of Sexuality, the first introduction to the archival movements of Foucault’s methodological and conceptual shifts as he writes and rewrites the History of Sexuality series. Clements’s research centrally engages Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through both his published works and the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the subject of her next book in progress, Foucault the Confessor. The posthumous publication of History of Sexuality, Volume 4, Les Aveux de la chair (2018, translated as Confessions of the Flesh in 2021) confirms the extent of his engagement with early Christianity and ancient sexual ethics as an art of living. Clements is particularly interested in the ethico-political possibilities of how Foucault’s work on subjection at the power-knowledge nexus incorporates a necessary third axis of ethics in order to account for the possibilities for self-formation and challenges to structures of domination.
More broadly, Clements is an ethicist working on how humans can shape their lives through daily practices, even as they are already subject differentially to forms of power and knowledge, and come to critique the social, political, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that render humans differentially vulnerable to structural violence. Her 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. Between 1977 and 1984, Foucault became particularly interested in Cassian as part of the genealogy of the desiring subject–and Sites reconsiders these readings through Cassian’s attention to embodied, affective, and inter-relational practices.
Influenced by her mentors at Brown University (Ph.D., 2014), Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S., 2007), and Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 2003), as well as her students at Rice, Clements’s teaching and service share her research attention to recognizing human ability and critiquing structural disparities.
Selected Distinctions
Chercheuse invitée, L’Institut d’études avancées de l’université de Strasbourg (2025)
Chercheuse invitée, programme DEA, FMSH/EHESS (2024)
Chercheuse en résidence, Maison Suger (June-July 2024)
Pré-rapporteuse and member of the jury for the Habilitation to direct research (Habilitation à diriger des recherches-HDR) of Sandra Boehringer (garante : Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2023.
Finalist, George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, Rice University (2022)
Allison Sarofim Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, Rice University (2020-2021)
Individual Research Grant, American Academy of Religion (2021)
Finalist, Sophia Meyer Farb Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Teaching, Rice University (2019, 2016)
Faculty Fellowship, Humanities Research Center, Rice University (2017-2018; 2022-2023)
Award for Outstanding Service, Department of Religion, Rice University (2017)
Outstanding Faculty Associate Award, Jones College, Rice University (2017)
Distinguished Faculty Associate Award, Jones College, Rice University (2016)
Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion (2014)
Phi Beta Kappa, Brown University (2014)
Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow, Brown University (2013-2014)
Mellon Fellowship for the Summer Workshop on Cognitive Science/
Neuroscience and the Humanities, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2011)