black studies scholar
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interdisciplinary writer
I am a Black Studies scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I received my PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2025, where my dissertation examined the work of the Jamaican critical theorist Sylvia Wynter and her radical rethinking of the human, epistemology, modern history, and social transformation.
My intellectual commitments are rooted in Black feminist theory and praxis, the Black Radical Tradition, and the study of the worldwide African diaspora across philosophy, literature, history, politics, and culture. My work is broadly concerned with how Black thinkers, artists, and political movements have diagnosed the structures of the modern world while generating alternative conceptions of freedom, humanity, sociality, and collective life.
As a writer of Sudanese origin, a second major strand of my scholarship engages Sudanese history, political thought, revolution, and contemporary politics. Through this work, I consider Sudan as a critical site for thinking about African liberation, counterrevolution, militarism, and the changing architecture of global power.
View recent publications across genres.
book project
My in progress monograph, preemptively titled Sylvia Wynter and Black Study: Experiments in Metasystemic Inquiry reconstructs the architectonic metanarrative that unfolds across fifty years of Wynter’s philosophical corpus.
It advances the claim that her corpus constitutes one of the most ambitious and sustained attempts in modern thought to reimagine the human through a meta-systemic and transcalar framework—and it offers scholars an easy entry point into Wynter’s thought, which is notoriously dense.
methodological and political commitments
I had reached a stage in my intellectual development where political and historical analysis no longer felt sufficient. Which is to say, this project burgeoned out of my existential discontentment with merely understanding how the last 500 years of human history played out. The question that preoccupied me is how can we make sense of the fact that our species has arrived at a point of astonishing intellectual aptitude, while simultaneously exacerbating social, political, and economic systems based in brute violence, irreversible annihilation, and unprecedented disparities in resource distribution and quality of life? This is not just a question of how power has been formulated and reformulated in the modern epoch to produce the most sophisticated global system of domination to date—it is also a question of why. Why elicits a different register of thought than how. Why do we find ourselves in this particular version of the present? What would it take to end the cycle of brutality in favor of more sustainable political, social, and economic systems that provision collective human and planetary wellness?
“The task of the-first century
is the task […] of inventing a social order
based on reciprocal recognition
and the reciprocal conferring of human value.”
Sylvia Wynter
Black Metamorphosis
Najaer, Umniya, and Yousuf Abubakr. “Guerre au Soudan: le Canada impliqué.” Droits et libertés 45, no. 1 (Printemps/Été 2026): 11–15.
Lucas, J. S., Irikefe, P. O., Uchendu, A., Najaer, U., Adejoro, C. O., Sterling, P., & Lee, D. Position: Breaking the Dual Curse of Multilingual AI Requires Socio-Technical Guardrails, Not Post-Hoc Alignment Alone. In Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning Position Paper Track.
Najaer, Umniya. “Muzan Alneel (1986–2026): Sudanese Visionary and Revolutionary.” The Massachusetts Review. April 24, 2026. Massreview.org/2026/04/24/muzan-alneel-1986-2026-sudanese-visionary-and-revolutionary/
Najaer, Umniya. “for my sisters who entered the Nile with open eyes.”Mizna Online, February 13, 2026.
Najaer, Umniya. “Disarm Humanity: Dreaming of a Future without Blood on Our Hands: Meditations from the Third Decade of the Third Millennium,” Mizna 25, no. 2 (Futurities), guest eds. Barrak Alzaid and Aram Kavoossi (2024).
Najaer, Umniya. “Dear Alice, ‘for the murder of [your] bastard child’ of the starry-eyed tribe born to children.” In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, edited by Aracelis Girmay. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.
Najaer, Umniya. “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Mizna 23, no. 2 (Black SWANA Takeover), guest edited by Safia Elhillo (2022).
Najaer, Umniya. Armeika. Brooklyn, NY: Akashic Books, 2018. First-Generation African Poets Series, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani.
Najaer, Denver Painters Fight Toxic Labor Practices, The Colorado Independent.
Kundunani, Keppler, Najaer. “How One Man Refused to Spy on Fellow Muslims for the FBI — and Then Lost Everything,” The Nation, October 14, 2014.
publications
“I should constantly
remind myself that the real leap
consists in introducing invention
into existence.”
Franz Fanon
Black Skin. White Masks
Elegy for Sudan’s Martyrs: Toward a Poetic Discourse of the Nile
as a Site of Resistance and Repression
Association of the Worldwide African Diaspora Conference
Frames of Imagination: Bridging Worlds between Ethnography and Fiction
World Anthropological Union Congress Conference
(with Dr. Eman Shehata and Dr. Amina Alaoui Soulimani)
Making and Unmaking the World: Sylvia Wynter, Metanarrative,
and Decolonial Epistemologies
Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature
Seeding the First Consensual Encounter between African Descendants
and the Amazonian 'Yawanawa' Tribe
University of California, Berkeley, Psychedelic Reckoning Conference
Is Hope a Madness? Conjuring Hope in Times of Catastrophe
Furious Flower Poetry Conference, James Madison University
(with Ariel Ward and Dr. Ra Malika Imhotep)
Polydisciplinarity in Black Emergent Thought
Graduate Orientations to Black Studies by Black Studies Collective
Black Feminist Methods and the Combahee River Collective Statement
Salon curated by the Essayists Collective
“Dear Alice” a Black Girl in the Archive: the Speculative Interior World
Colloquium for UPENN’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Uteropolitics: Abortion Bans from American Slavery to ICE Detention
Anti-Racist + Anti-Fascist Pedagogies in the Age of Trump and Bolsonaro
American Studies Association Annual Conference, Honolulu HA
Sudan’s Torture Sites: A Ghost House Genealogy
Northern California Sudanese Association Conference, UC Berkeley
Infanticide and the Infant's Corpse: Enslaved Women’s Reproductive Lives”
UC Berkeley Annual St. Claire Drake Research Symposium
Arada’s Knotted Rope: A Spectroscopic Object Analysis of Materialized Maternity
Princeton Annual African and African American Studies Conference
talks and symposia
