Nadia Ellis studies the literature and culture of the Black diaspora, working throughout the 20th century and up to the present day. The questions that energize her projects emerge from diaspora's own paradoxes: communities forming out of dispersal; attachments emerging across difference; Black aesthetics both fusing and exploding traditions.

Increasingly, a thread of immateriality knits these concerns together in her newest writing projects, under the rubrics of religion, ritual, and performance.