Umniya Najaer
Dr. Umniya Najaer is an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar who completed her PhD in Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature Program in 2025. Her critical and creative pursuits ask: how do we make sense of the fact that our species has arrived at a point of astonishing intellectual aptitude – including but not limited to technological, scientific, and humanistic advancements – while continuing to perpetuate brute violence, irreversible annihilation of life, and unnecessary disparities in resource distribution and quality of life? Centering the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter, Umniya Najaer’s dissertation investigates alternate epistemologies and metanarratives of the human. Her forthcoming work deals with themes of planetary consciousness, unilateral disarmament of our species, and transpersonal attunement as a worldbuilding methodology. Sudanese by way of Germany and Turtle Island, Umniya is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization. She enjoys traveling, nature, animals, and the diversity of human spiritualities and artistic expression.
Her dissertation Worldbuilding at the End of the World is a collection of critical essays exploring what possibilities for worldbuilding—outside of the dominant episteme of western modernity—exist for us in the present and the near future. These poetic and speculative essays investigate how people of the global majority seeking an alternative way are actively engaged in worldbuilding practices within and outside the confines of the western episteme. Her aim as a writer, scholar, educator and artist is to offer critical and contemplative modality of hope, healing, and futurity as we collectively explore and begin to arrive at a new innerstanding of what it means to be human.
Recent publications include “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children” which follows the case of 16-year old Alice Clifton who was charged with murder in Philadelphia in 1787. This essay is based on archival research conducted on Black women’s and girls’ interior lives during two dissertation fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia (2020-2021) and at UPENN’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies (2021-2022).
In 2023 she produced the Living Archive of Black Studies (LABS) in which she interviewed emeritus professors who were at Stanford in the early years of the African and African American Studies program. In 2021 she was an artist and writer in residence at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia, Brazil. She worked on a forthcoming poetry manuscript documents the long journey of Sudanese people seeking liberation and self-determination and the ferocious state repression faced by leftist Sudanese activists, artists, scholars, and visionaries.
She co-founded the Black Studies Collective, a graduate student run initiative committed to fostering sustained study of core and emerging Black Studies theories, including ontology, the body, Black visual and sonic cultures, transnational Black liberation, and Black Feminist and Black Queer and Trans theories.