A Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and English, Mangum was appointed as Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in 2010. She is the author of Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998); editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800–1920 (Berg 2013); and guest editor of special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies. With Anne Valk of Brown University, she co-edits the book series Humanities and Public Life for the University of Iowa Press.

She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the ways that nineteenth-century British novels shaped readers’ understanding of women, of late life, and of connections between humans and other animals. She also publishes on current issues: publicly engaged pedagogy, the place of service in an academic career, and graduate student placement.

Mangum has served in a number of administrative roles, both on campus and nationally. At the University of Iowa, she has been Associate Chair for undergraduate studies in English, Interim Associate Dean of International Programs, Co-director of the Public Digital Humanities Cluster, Faculty Associate Director of the Obermann Center, and Faculty Senate Secretary. She co-directed a four-year Mellon-funded project, Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College and University of Iowa Partnership and a second Mellon-funded initiative, Humanities for the Public Good, dedicated to helping prepare humanities graduate students for careers in the public sector.

Beyond the University, she has served on the advisory boards of the journals Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies; the Age, Culture, Humanities journal; Victorian Review; Victorian Periodicals Review; Collaborations; PUBLIC, and Public Humanities. She has served as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance; Co-chair of the Council on the Status of Women in the Profession of the Modern Language Association;  member of the National Advisory Board and Executive Committee of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life; vice president of the National Humanities Alliance Board of Directors; member of the Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes; secretary of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages (of the Modern Language Association); Chair of the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee of the Modern Language Association; President of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS); and Associate Director of the Dickens Project, a consortium of 70 international universities.  

Professor Mangum’s contributions have garnered the May Brodbeck Distinguished Achievement Award, UI President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence (2004), the Humane Society Animal and Society Course Award for Innovation (2005), the UI Brody Award for Service to the University and State of Iowa (2008), the British Women Writers Association Biennial Award for Contributions to the Study of British Women Writers (2010), the President’s Civic Engagement Leadership Award from the Iowa & Minnesota Campus Compact (2024). In 2017 she was inducted into the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship.