Nijah Cunningham (b.1985, U.S.) specializes in African American and African diasporic literature and his fields of interest include black studies, performance studies, visual culture, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial criticism. Titled Quiet Dawn: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism, his current book project reconsiders the material legacies of the revolutionary past by exploring questions of embodied performance, temporality, and the archive as they relate to the 1960s. Ultimately, this project attends to modes of experience and practice that fall outside of normative accounts of black radical politics but, nonetheless, gesture to worlds that could have been. He is currently a fellow at Princeton University. He is currently a Cotsen fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows.

Cunningham has previously taught at Hunter College, CUNY. He has publications in Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory; Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2017; and The Studio Museum of Harlem exhibition catalogue, Fore, 2012. In 2016, he co-curated the exhibition Caribbean Queer Visualities in collaboration with Erica James and David Scott. He received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and his BA from Boston College, where he was a McNair Scholar.