Benjamin Mangrum writes about twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature in English. He is the author of Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (Oxford 2019), which examines twentieth-century literary fiction and popular philosophy to understand shifts in American liberalism after the Second World War. His essays have appeared in PMLA, Diacritics, New Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere.
Mangrum’s research areas include the environmental humanities, digital studies, genre and form, and the relationship between literature and political theory. He is currently at work on two book projects. The first is a cultural history of environmental rights. The second considers how literature represents “computational thinking,” an idea that has recently become important in computer science but has much older origins in the cultures of science and technology.
Mangrum received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to MIT, Mangrum taught at the University of the South, the University of Michigan, and Davidson College.
21L.003 Reading Fiction: Computers and the Novels that Read Them (Fall 2022)
21L.512 American Authors: Race, Environment, and Modern American Fiction (Fall 2022)
21L.707 Problems in Cultural Interpretation: Posthumanism (Spring 2023)
Subjects taught in recent years:
