PhD '24 (History of Science), University of Chicago

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Rise of the Human Sciences; Studies of Secularity; Engagement between Science and Religion; History of Modern France; History of Science, Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries; Social and Political Contexts of Knowledge Production

BIOGRAPHY

Arthur Clement is a historian of science and intellectual historian of Modern Europe. He specializes in the trajectory of secularity in nineteenth-century France, the engagement between science and religion, and history of the human sciences. His dissertation, entitled “Secularity and the Institutionalization of the ‘Sciences of Religion’ in Early Third Republic France,” examines the introduction of the study of religion as a replacement for theology in university education and what the new disciplinary configuration reveals about the historical conception of laïcité. The project also sheds light on how the meaning of laïcité, which does not simply mean the subtraction of the religious, as in English, is itself a reflection of developments in the trajectory of secularity in France. His current research project investigates whether common factors prompted European thinkers after the 1830s to became convinced that there was little humans could do to alter the Earth’s stable climate and that the races of the human species were fixed.