Chanté Mouton Kinyon

Chanté Mouton Kinyon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her primary research explores transnational Black American literature and culture, particularly the intersections between Black American and Irish culture and literature. Kinyon holds a Ph.D. from the National University of Ireland, Galway (2017), with a dissertation titled 'Analogous States: John Millington Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Performance of Ethnography,' advised by Dr. Patrick Lonergan. She earned an M.A. and a B.A. from San Francisco State University. Her book project examines ethnographic interpretation in John Millington Synge’s works alongside Zora Neale Hurston’s theatre, positioning both as autoethnographic researcher-practitioners who challenged representational caricatures through cultural forms in theatre. This work provides a comparative dialectical critique of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, tracing cross-cultural awareness between Afro-America and Ireland to the eighteenth century. Additional projects include analyses of the 1968 film 'Uptight,' drawing from John Ford’s 'The Informer' and Liam O'Flaherty’s novel, and Calvin Johnson’s *The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict* (2016), investigating Reed’s relationships with Irish Americans in detention.

Prior to her appointment, Kinyon was the 2019–2021 Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow and the 2018–2019 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow at Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. She served as Lecturer in Dartmouth College’s Arts & Sciences Academic Divisions (2015–2018), teaching courses such as 'Robbers, Pirates, and Terrorists,' 'Modern Black American Literature,' 'Documentary Theater,' and 'Irish Identity and the West of Ireland,' and as Visiting Scholar in Dartmouth’s Department of African and African American Studies (2013–2015). At NUI Galway, she taught 'Oscar Wilde: Decadence and the Making of Modernism' and first-year English tutorials. Kinyon’s research interests encompass African American Literature, 20th Century Irish Literature, Crime Fiction, Queer Literature, and Transnational Literature. Her key publication is 'Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals in the Irish and Harlem Renaissances: John Millington Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, and The Transatlantic Gesture' in Modern Drama (Vol. 65, No. 4, 2022). She has presented at the Modern Language Association (2017, 'Beyond the Voice: the Oral Tradition and Hurston's Theatre') and University College Dublin (2013, 'Performing Cultural Trauma: Connecting the Famine and Slavery'). Awards include the Galway Doctoral Research Fellowship and a fellowship from the International Federation for Theatre Research. She teaches undergraduate courses such as 'The Black and Green Atlantic' and ''Bloody Conflict': US & Ireland 1968-1969.'

Professional Email: cmoutonk@nd.edu