A headshot of Carmen Kynard from the chest up, smiling, wearing a black shirt and large brown earrings.

Carmen Kynard, PhD

Carmen Kynard, PhD

Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English, Texas Christian University

Carmen Kynard (she/her) is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Before TCU, she worked in English and Gender Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice as well as English, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

She interrogates race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/ Black cultures and languages, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition and literacies studies. She has taught high school with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools, served as a writing program administrator, and worked as a teacher educator. She has led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning and has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, Literacy and Composition Studies and more.

Her award-winning book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies, makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. Her current projects focus on young Black women in college and Black Feminist/Fugitive imaginations in anti-racist pedagogies.

Carmen traces her research and teaching at her website, Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions,  which has garnered over 1.9 million hits since its 2012 inception.

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