Assistant Professor
English
Institute for Writing Studies
St. Augustine Library
(718) 990-
kynardc@stjohns.edukynardc@stjohns.edu
Educational Background
Ph.D., New York University, 2005 (English Ed)
M.A., Lehman College/CUNY, 2000 (English and Comp-Rhet)
B.A., Stanford University, 1993 (Feminist Studies and Afro Am)
Profile
Carmen Kynard, an assistant professor, joined the faculty at St.
John’s University, in 2008 as the director of the first year
writing program with the Institute for Writing Studies.
Before coming to St. John’s University, she worked in the
Department of Urban Education at Rutgers University and in the
Department of English at Medgar Evers College of the City
University of New York.
Kynard works at the intersection of critical race theory,
composition 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 and advisory group planner for
Looking Both Ways (a joint staff development project between CUNY,
the New York City Department of Education, and the Institute for
Literacy Studies.) Kynard is a graduate and Founders Fellow
of New York University Steinhardt’s School of Education where she
won the Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2005 and has published
chapters in Genre Across the Curriculum, Teaching English
Today: Advocating Change in the Secondary Curriculum, Alt Dis:
Alternative Discourse and the Academy; articles in
Changing English, Teaching English at the Two-Year College,
College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research
Quarterly, and English Teaching: Practice and
Critique; forthcoming works in College Composition and
Communication and Souls. Her first book,
Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New
Century in Composition Studies, is currently being revised for
SUNY Press. She is currently working on a new project that
focuses on Black female college students’ writing as sites of
recursive memory.