Chanté Mouton Kinyon

Chanté Mouton Kinyon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. A scholar of transatlanticism and race, Mouton Kinyon investigates African American, Irish, and Caribbean literature and culture from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. In addition to her scholarship on the long history of the Irish-Black cultural exchange, her research also considers the transnationality of writers and art that is often limited to discussions of its national impact and significance in contrast to the very international explorations of the artists themselves. In particular, her scholarship focuses on performative material that articulates race and identity; her goal is to illuminate a narrative of cultural exchange that is rooted at the intersection of literature and history.

Mouton Kinyon wrote the introduction to Black Matters: African American and African College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories and her work has previously appeared in Modern Drama. Forthcoming, she will have an article on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s engagement with the work of Dion Boucicault in Contemporary Theatre Review: Interventions on the afterlives of The Octoroon.

In her first book project, The Transatlantic Gesture: the Irish and African American Cultural Exchange, she studies the symbiotic relationship between Irish and African American authors; particularly the ways in which these authors signify and conceptualize race and marginality. This signaling, which she calls the transatlantic gesture, created intimate bonds between the work of Black and Irish artists and activists. The Transatlantic Gesture tracks the relationship between African Americans and the Irish throughout the twentieth century with a coda that examines the dynamic of the transatlantic gesture in the Lesser Antilles.

The 2019–2021 Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow (ND), Mouton Kinyon was previously the 2018–2019 NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. In 2025, she will be a fellow at The University of Edinburgh, where she has been awarded the RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.