Niki Kasumi Clements is a specialist in the work of Michel Foucault, modern philosophy, and late ancient Christian asceticism (which come together in her 2020 monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self, University of Notre Dame Press). On the basis of her research in the Foucault archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France since 2019 (the sixth collection of which she inventoried for the BnF in 2024), Clements is completing two books that focus on Foucault’s last decade (1974-1984): Chez Foucault: Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality and Foucault the Confessor – focused on Foucault’s unpublished archives to chart his shifting conceptual apparatus of power-knowledge-ethics, notably through his engagement with the history of Christianity and ancient ethics.

A governing member of the Centre Michel Foucault, a 2025 invited researcher with the Institute for Advanced Study in Strasbourg, a 2024 invited researcher with the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (EHESS, Paris), an editorial board member for Foucault Studies, and the co-inaugurator of the Foucault Seminar at the American Academy of Religion, Clements is also the co-editor of the volume Foucault’s Confessions with James Faubion and Daniel Wyche (under contract, Columbia University Press). She has published widely on Foucault, John Cassian, asceticism, gender, sexuality, affects and emotions, hermeneutics, cognitive neuro-science in her 2017 edited volume Mental Religion, and medical ethics in the Journal of Ethics for the American Medical Association.