Professor Mark D. Jordan

Biography: 

Before Harvard, I taught at several other institutions, including Emory University and the University of Notre Dame, with a previous visiting appointment at the University of Toronto. My work has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and grants from the Carpenter and Ford Foundations. I am a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research Interests:

My teaching and writing have refused to settle within a single sub-field or topic. At Harvard, I have offered courses on the Western traditions of Christian ethics, the relations of religion to Modernist art or literature, and the prospects for sexual ethics, as well as research seminars on Thomas Aquinas and Michel Foucault (separately—though I have thought of teaching them together on the topic of power). My books follow roughly the same pattern. My latest, published in November, reconsiders some literary and philosophical languages used over the last century to describe same-sex love and its spiritualities. Before that, there were books on the pedagogy of Christian theology, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, and notions of religion in Michel Foucault. Running through all of these are questions about the affordances and limitations of human language before the divine—which is to say, in every moment of speaking

Current Projects: 

I am trying to find or make the genre for a book on the writing of Christian ethics. The hope would be to rehabilitate some forgotten genres while discerning those that are now emerging in unlikely cultural locations.

Recent Publications: 

Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Teaching Bodies: Moral Formation in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021.

Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023