J. Kameron Carter works in black studies (African American and African Diaspora studies), using theological and religious studies concepts, critical theory, and increasingly poetry in doing so. Driving his work are questions pertaining to the theory and practice of blackness, indeed, of blackness as an alternate "pedagogy of the sacred" that the black church (at its best) expresses.

In pursuing this research, Professor Carter on the one hand examines how Christian theological ideas, especially christological ideas (claims about the person and work of Jesus Christ) and notions of theological anthropology (the Christian construction of the human), have funded racial, gendered, sexual, colonial, and settler imaginaries, and how the secular only amplifies (not overcomes) modernity’s theological protocols. On the other hand, he studies those aesthetic, literary, and philosophical expressions that reveal blackness as nonexclusionary Otherwise Life -- Life that unsettles modernity’s theological constitution, Life that moves "paratheologically" both within modernity's theo-political constraints and yet wanders out from and fugitively to the side of those constraints, Life in its breaks, Life that is the outside within, the open. Churchical, ecumenical blackness is his object of study.

Professor Carter's book Race: A Theological Account appeared in 2008 (New York: Oxford UP). He is the editor of Religion and the Future of Blackness (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013). He has two books near completion: God’s Property: Blackness and the Problem of Sovereignty and Postracial Blues: Religion and the Twenty-First Century Color Line.