Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat Selected as Writer in Residence for Digital Journal

Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat, assistant professor of English at Niagara University, has been selected to serve as a writer-in-residence for Synapsis, a digital journal at the intersection of medicine, culture, and criticism published by Columbia University.

During the 2024-25 academic year, Dr. Mangat will contribute articles about the issue of disability, including book reviews, as well as pieces about his research on the intersection of disability and race for a public audience.

Synapsis was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician, with a mission to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing, and connecting scholars and thinkers from different spheres.

Dr. Mangat earned his B.A. at the University of Manitoba, his M.A. at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville, and his Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of disability and race in contemporary American literature and art. Dr. Mangat is currently at work on his first 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. He 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 25 years. His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in the edited collections Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction, Neurodiversity on Television and Care and Disability, as well as the Journal of Popular Music Studies