Benjamin Mangrum
Meet Ben
Benjamin Mangrum is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, where his research explores the intersections of environmental humanities, world literature, and the history of ideas and media underlying digital humanities. He is the author of two books: The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford University Press, 2025), which examines literary and cultural attitudes toward technological obsolescence, and Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), which studies mid-century fiction and liberalism’s cultural crises. His essays have appeared in PMLA, American Literature, New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature, among other journals. His work in environmental studies has been published in ELH, Arizona Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Prose. His scholarship has been recognized with the Levitan Prize, the Bredvold Prize, and a fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows. Before joining MIT, he held teaching positions at the University of the South, the University of Michigan, and Davidson College.