I’m an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’ve published essays in PMLA, American Literature, New Literary History, Genre, Contemporary Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, and elsewhere. These essays examine topics ranging from the environmental humanities to twentieth-century “world literature” and the history of ideas and media underlying contemporary methods in the digital humanities. My work has been awarded the Levitan Prize, the Bredvold Prize, and a fellowship with the Michigan Society of Fellows.

I use this website to share my research. In most cases, you can download PDFs of my essays and book chapters on the Writing page.

My first book, Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, analyzes the ways in which the US literary marketplace after WWII provided cultural legitimacy to anti-organizational political sensibilities. I show how the cultural prestige of new forms of liberal thought and feeling licensed opposition to New Deal-style reform. Land of Tomorrow was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. I’m now at work on two book projects. The first is a study of environmental rights, and the second examines a genre I call the comedy of computation.

Before arriving at MIT, I was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. From 2017-2020, I taught at the University of Michigan, where I was a postdoctoral fellow with the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) in Michigan’s English Department. From 2015 to 2017, I held a visiting position at Davidson College, where I taught in the Departments of English and Environmental Studies.

My work in the environmental humanities has appeared in such journals as ELH, Arizona Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Prose. I’ve also offered courses on “Race, the Environment, and Modern American Fiction,” “Posthumanism and the End of Nature,” “Contemporary Southern Literature and Environmental History,” and “Environmental Harm and Global Fiction.” See my Teaching  page for sample syllabi.

I’m from Brandon, Mississippi, and completed a Ph.D. in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can reach me by email at bmangrum AT mit.edu.