Satya P. Mohanty was born in Orissa, India, and was educated in India and the United States. His work in literary criticism and theory has focused on issues that are shaped by his bi-cultural background and his commitment to a vision of culture as "a field of moral inquiry" (on this view of culture, see chapter 7 of Literary Theory and the Claims of History). For a succinct statement of his current and past research projects, see the interview "Thinking Across Cultures."

Mohanty is one of the founders of the "Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project," a think-tank that includes over 350 scholars from colleges and universities in North America and beyond. For FMS researchers, "minority" groups include those whose access to social institutions is restricted because of their group identities, based on such factors as race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Since 2005 Mohanty has served as Director of the FMS Summer Institute, which has been funded through two three-year grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.