I am a poet, scholar, and psychoanalytic candidate.

I am also a lecturer in English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

My first book, The Grid, was published by Carcanet in the UK and Changes in the US. The Grid was shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, and named one of “the best poetry books of 2023” by The Telegraph. “The Grid is no mere footnote to the classics,” the poet Katie Peterson writes. “[I]n this work, Mandel changes the shape of the American narrative poem forever.”

I received my BA in English with distinction in the major from Yale College, where I was awarded the Wrexham Prize for the best senior thesis in the humanities division (on Elizabeth Bishop and object-relations psychoanalysis) and the Clapp Fellowship, a year-long grant to write poetry. I then earned a joint PhD in English and interdisciplinary humanities from Princeton University. In addition to psychoanalysis, my academic interests lie in 20th-century poetry and poetics, the history of modernism, the relationship of literature to the human sciences, and archival theory. Pursuing a longstanding interest in becoming a psychotherapist, I entered psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI), where I am now a third-year candidate in adult psychoanalysis in the licensure-qualifying program.

I see patients for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis through the NYPSI Treatment Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In 2022–2023, I was a psychoanalytic intern at The Greene Clinic in Brooklyn.

At Columbia, I teach literature and sometimes political theory in the Core Curriculum. I have taught previously as a preceptor in the English and psychology departments at Princeton, and as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, where I offered an undergraduate “inquiry seminar” on anxiety.

My poems, essays, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in History of the Present, The Winter Anthology, Raritan Quarterly, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares Solos, The New Inquiry, PN Review, New Poetries, and elsewhere. Among other things, I have written about the decipherment of Linear B, the history of facts, Keats and ill-advised walking tours, male fantasies (and Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies), and Nabokov’s dreams.