Chanté Mouton Kinyon
Chanté Mouton Kinyon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English.
Her primary research explores transnational African American literature and culture. Presently, she investigates the international aspects of early twentieth century African American writers by examining their influence on and from Irish culture and literature. Her book project focuses on how ethnographic interpretation in John Millington Synge’s works juxtaposes with ethnographic interpretation in Zora Neale Hurston’s theatre. Synge, a major playwright of the Irish Renaissance, and Hurston, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, are presented in the manuscript as autoethnographic researcher-practitioners. Dr. Kinyon argues that the authors employed important cultural forms in their theatre to challenge the representational caricatures that contributed to the marginalization of both the Irish and African Americans. She exposes how Synge’s and Hurston’s claims to authenticity and cultural intimacy, through the use of ethnographic practices, are undermined—as the material created was intended for the theatre, an artificial space. Ultimately, the work presents a comparative dialectical critique of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, and asserts a cross-cultural awareness between Afro-America and Ireland that can be traced back to the eighteenth century.
Dr. Kinyon received her bachelor's and master's degrees from San Francisco State University, and her Ph.D. from National University of Ireland, Galway (2017). There, advised by Dr. Patrick Lonergan, she wrote her dissertation on "Analogous States: John Millington Synge, Zoral Neale Hurston, and the Performance of Ethnography."
Dr. Kinyon was a Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame from 2019-2021, and the Keough-Naughton Institute's National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in the 2018-2019 academic year.
Prior to her NEH fellowship, Dr. Kinyon was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College (2013-2015), and then a Lecturer at Dartmouth in the Arts & Sciences Academic Divisions (2015-2018). She taught several classes at Dartmouth—including "Robbers, Pirates, and Terrorists," "Modern Black American Literature," "Documentary Theater," and "Irish Identity and the West of Ireland."
Dr. Kinyon has received a Galway Doctoral Research Fellowship as well as a fellowship from the International Federation for Theatre Research Travel. At NUI Galway, she taught "Oscar Wilde:Decadence and the Making of Modernism" and First-Year English tutorials.
Dr. Kinyon has several articles in preparation and has delivered papers at numerous conferences, including "Beyond the Voice: the Oral Tradition and Hurston's Theatre" at the Modern Language Association (2017) and "Performing Cultural Trauma: Connecting the Famine and Slavery" at University College Dublin (2013).
Before earning her doctorate, Dr. Kinyon was the marketing and production coordinator for City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, the coordinator of distribution client services at Chronicle Books, and the community manager of Sadie Magazine. She was also the newsletter editor of the Northern California Book Publicity and Marketing Association and a contributing editor to the literary magazine Instant City.