Mark Cladis, the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, has three academic homes: the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. His work is at the intersection of political, religious, and environmental thought, and is as likely to engage poetry and literature as philosophy and critical theory. Environmental justice and Indigenous ecology are prominent in his work. He has recently published In Search of a Course, and his newest book, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination, is in the production stage at Columbia University Press.

Creating and Preserving amid the Catastrophic: the Role of Receptivity in Worldmaking and Creativity in Worldfinding

Addressing his audience as storytellers, worldmakers, and world-preservers in the context of catastrophe, Mark Cladis will ask: What stories will you tell? What worlds will you build? What worlds will you preserve? Storytelling and worldmaking are simultaneously forms of creation and forms of receptivity. Creation requires receptivity even as receptivity requires creation. Preservation—a form of creation—belongs to the work of renovating worlds. The process of renovation requires knowing how to discard and how to preserve from the past for the sake of building futures. Creation and renovation are never creation ex nihilo. And both are ultimately forms of co-creation with such agents as ancestors and presences of the more-than-human. This presentation will largely draw from Romantic and Indigenous sources.