Carmen Kynard

Associate Professor of English

St. Augustine Library, Room 166 

(718) 990-8033 

Educational Background   

Ph.D., New York University, 2005 (English Ed)
B.A., Stanford University, 1993 (Feminist Studies and Afro American Studies)

Profile

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 Quarterlyand more. Her first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies (SUNY Press, 2013) makes Black Freedom a 21^st 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” (carmenkynard.org).