Mukti Lakhi Mangharam

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell, an M.Phil. in Criticism and Culture from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in English and History from the University of York. Her scholarship and teaching draw on the various historical and literary cultures she came in contact with during her childhood in Belgium, annual visits to family in India, research trips to South Africa, and editorial internships at the Feminist Press at CUNY. These experiences have produced a fascination for various languages and narrative traditions. Her passion for literature is driven by the belief that reading is one of the best ways to imaginatively smuggle people across enforced barriers of class, gender, nation, and religion. The texts she explores posit notions of a shared human world through imaginative uses of literary forms, compelled by the question of how a concern with the wellbeing of others has been historically achieved. Her first book, Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress (Ohio State University Press, 2017), explores local radical universalisms in Indian and South African literatures as they are put to work towards democratic change. Her second book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, extends this argument to consider how such lineages of liberation, still present in radical texts including the Dalit memoir, film, and the realist novel, continue to posit fuller notions of autonomy and agency in response to neoliberal ideas of freedom. She has published widely on postcolonial literatures and cultures in journals including ELH, Diacritics, ARIEL, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Safundi.