Biography
Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and a member of the Rose Bente Lee Ostapenko Center for Ethics in Medicine and Healthcare. Dr. Mangat’s teaching and research focus on the intersectionality of disability and race: he draws on his training in disability studies to analyze multiethnic American literature and art, with a particular focus on memoirs and popular music.
Dr. Mangat approaches his teaching and research in a cohesive manner. He seeks to enrich his student’s learning experience by offering them opportunities, like research assistant positions, after they complete their coursework. You can read about one of Dr. Mangat’s many collaborations with a students.
Focus of Teaching
Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat’s teaching ranges from the English department’s general education course (ENG110) to a survey of American literature (ENG201) to literary method courses on aesthetic theory (ENG260) and disability studies (ENG360).
Dr. Mangat’s teaching centers on the body. When teaching, he gets students thinking and writing about how bodies (theirs and others) are positioned within the broader structures of ableism and racism as well as capitalism. He teaches students how to critique dominant representations of bodily difference and then how to accommodate various kinds of difference in their community and the built environment. Students leave his courses with a better understanding of how they can change the world around them for the better.
Current Research
Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat is currently at work on his first academic book, entitled Forms of Affiliation: Disability Life Writing and the Socialization of Care, which considers how disability life writing imagines the socialization of care through the formalization of networked affiliations that counter the neoliberal privatization of care within the enclosure of the family.
Dr. Mangat is also currently co-editing (with Christina Fogarasi) a special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies that will offer a critical reassessment of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s foundational concept of “narrative prosthesis” after twenty-five years.
His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in the edited collections, Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (Brill), Neurodiversity on Television (McFarland) and Care and Disability (Routledge), as well as the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal.
He also presently serves as a contributor-in-residence for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, where he publishes criticism at the intersection of medicine and culture.
Service
Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat is committed to supporting and highlighting the voices of students: he was selected as one of the inaugural Multicultural Liaisons, a position that requires him to serve as a contact person, advisor, and ombudsperson for marginalized groups (BIPOC and International students as well as students with disabilities) on campus.
Dr. Mangat acts as a Humanities Faculty Advisor for the Vincentian Social Justice Minor: he runs workshops for faculty on how to make their classrooms more accessible and their course content more diverse in terms of disability and race.
He presently organizes the “Literature and Social Justice Speaker Series” (for which he received an Academic Innovation Fund Mini Grant), inviting literary scholars to speak about how humanistic inquiry can contribute to social justice, and which can be read about here. He previously organized a symposium, “Care in Action” (for which he received an Academic Innovation Fund Master Grant), which brought together academics, students, and community members to discuss ways to address the ongoing “crisis of care,” and which can be read about here.
He also serves as a member of the advisory committee for “Communities of Care,” a Mellon Foundation-funded interdisciplinary research project (organized by the Gender Institute and the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo) that seeks to better understand and address issues faced by caregivers and those with disabilities.
Educational Background
- 2009 University of Manitoba, B.Sc/B.A.
- 2011 University of Tennessee – Knoxville, M.A.
- 2020 University at Buffalo – SUNY, Ph.D.