Niki Clements, PhD is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion at Rice University. She works at the disciplinary intersection between the history of Christian practice, philosophy of religion and religious ethics. She specializes in Christian asceticism and mysticism in late antiquity, highlighting its resources for thinking through contemporary ethical formation and conceptions of the self. She is currently completing the first comprehensive treatment of the ethical thought of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), a late antique Catholic architect of Latin monasticism doctrinally marginalized for his optimistic views on human agency. Engaging Michel Foucault’s late work on ethics — which sees Cassian as a crucial inaugurator of modern disciplinary subjectivity — she critiques the conceptual limitations that Foucault’s philosophical categories impose on his reading of Cassian, late antique Christianity and the study of religion. She also pursues a trans-disciplinary approach with cognitive neuroscience to argue that ethical formation integrates consciousness, embodiment and affectivity. She is the volume editor for Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture, as part of the forthcoming “Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.”
