Nitara C.Ph.D. Student (2025 Cohort)

Nitara C. (she/they) is a first-year doctoral student in African American Studies at Emory University. While she reads and writes across continental philosophy, black critical theory, political theology, and literature, Nitara’s research primarily contends with how questions of time and temporality choreograph black political discourse. More specifically, she is interested in synthesizing the continental tradition with critical philosophies of race in order to ordain a theory of what she terms as black messianic nihilism, which, seizing the language of both Warren and Derrida, argues that black justice is messianic, and therefore always to come. As such, the central objective of her graduate research is to capture the messianic paradigm as a means to both inaugurate alternative registers of black temporality and to critique notions of justice conjured by the politics of futurity.

Before coming to Emory, Nitara earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, where she graduated with honors and distinction and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. There, her work was supported by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.