Mark S. Cladis

Professor and Chair
Religious Studies

Mark S. Cladis is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies. His publications and teaching pertain to the history of Western political, social, and religious thought, especially the religious nature and origins of liberal, democratic society. Religion and the environment is another subject of his research and teaching.

He is the author of Public Vision, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 2003; Columbia University Press, 2006)) and A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 1992), and over thirty articles. After receiving his doctorate from Princeton University, where he studied philosophy and social theory as they relate to the field of religious studies, he taught at the University of North Carolina, Stanford University, and at Vassar College where he served as Chair for six years. He is the editor of Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2001) and of Education and Punishment: Durkheim and Foucault (Oxford: Center of Durkheimian Studies, 1999). His most recent publication is Columbia University Press's reissue of Public Vision, Private Lives; this edition contains the new, substantive Introduction, "Religion, Democracy, and Modernity."