Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
St. Augustine Library, Room 166
718.990.8033
kynardc@stjohns.edu
http://carmenkynard.org
Ph.D., New York University, 2005 (English Education)
B.A., Stanford University, 1993 (Feminist Studies and
Afro-American Studies)
Carmen Kynard, an associate professor, joined the faculty at St.
John’s University, in 2008 where she also directs the first year
writing program with the Institute for Writing Studies.
Before coming to St. John’s University, she worked at
Rutgers-Newark University and Medgar Evers College of the City
University of New York.
Kynard works at the intersection of composition-rhetoric
studies, new literacies studies, and urban education. In
particular, she interrogates race and the politics of writing
instruction in secondary and post-secondary settings, looking
closely at the ways racialized political economies get expressed as
literacy praxis. She strives to bring to her research, teaching,
and service a commitment to educational change where the
humanities, writing studies, and critical pedagogy (in theory and
in practice) work in conjunction.
Kynard is a former high school teacher with the New York City
public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools and college writing
instructor at the City University of New York (CUNY). She has
led numerous projects focusing on issues of language, literacy, and
learning: consultant for the Community Learning Centers Grant
Project in Harlem, educational consultant and curriculum developer
for the African Diaspora Institute/Caribbean Cultural Center of New
York, instructional coordinator for the Center for Black Literature
at Medgar Evers College, seminar leader for the New York City
Writing Project, seminar leader for Looking Both Ways (a joint
staff development project between CUNY, the New York City
Department of Education, and the Institute for Literacy
Studies.) She has published in Harvard Educational
Review, Changing English, College Composition and
Communication, College English, Computers and
Composition, Reading Research Quarterly and more. Her
first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest,
and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies (SUNY
Press, 2013) makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement.
She is currently working on a new book project that
focuses on Black female college students’ writing as sites of
recursive memory as well as three research articles that
interrogate programmatic assessment practices and learning
objectives as racialized artifacts. She traces her
research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and
the Black Radical Tradition” (http://carmenkynard.org).