Ben Mangrum is a literary scholar and faculty member in the Department of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, political theory, and environmental humanities. His research examines how fiction and literary culture respond to social and political crises, including questions of democracy, ethics, and ecological change. Mangrum is the author of Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (2018), which analyzes how postwar American novelists engaged with the limits and possibilities of liberal thought. His work integrates literary analysis with political and philosophical inquiry, contributing to contemporary debates in literary studies and cultural theory.