MANAN KAPOOR
Undergraduate Courses / Instructor of Record
________________________Lyric Currents: American Poetry Through Other Continents
Junior Tutorial, Harvard University, Spring 2027
Lyric Currents explores how global literary traditions have shaped modern and contemporary American poetry. The title draws on Wai Chee Dimock’s phrase “through other continents” to frame two central questions: How have poetic forms and traditions been routed to American poetics, and how have these poetic forms, voices, and modes taken root in new cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts? Moving chronologically from early twentieth-century modernist poetry to collections published in the past year, we will trace how American poets have engaged—and been transformed by—other literary traditions. Each week we’ll read (at least) two poems together in class, and our readings will include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Agha Shahid Ali, among others. Across these poems, we will consider how lyric poetry absorbs and reconfigures global influences, how translation and hybridity shape poetic voice, and how formal and aesthetic choices register experiences of encounter, travel, cultural contact, displacement, and belonging. Along with poetry, we will read critical and theoretical works that help us think about travel, influence, displacement, and circulation within broader frameworks such as postcolonialism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. Together, these readings will help us understand how American poetry participates in wider literary networks and how the lyric becomes a site where global histories and movements are registered, revised, and reimagined.
Travel, Travelers, Travelogues: A Global Perspective
Junior Tutorial, Harvard University, Spring 2026
From epic voyages across oceans to quiet poems about self-discovery, travel has long been a powerful force in global literature. But how have travelers and travel writing shaped culture and the stories we tell? This course explores the dynamic relationship between travel writing, race, nationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization by examining travel writing across periods. In this course, we will read the writings of John Mandeville, Marco Polo, François Bernier, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Edith Wharton, Chris Marker, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, W.G. Sebald, V.S. Naipaul, Claude-Lévi Strauss, Anthony Bourdain, and others. Through this diverse range of texts that includes travelogues, novels, journals, memoirs, films, and documentaries, we will examine how people have written about the world—past, present, and imagined. Some of the critical debates that will inform our discussions include world/global literary studies, cosmopolitanism, globalization, and postcolonial theory.
Graduate Student Instructor / Teaching Assistant
____________________________Reading for Fiction Writers (HUM 9)
Course Instructors: Prof. Neel Mukherjee and Laura van den Berg, Harvard University, Fall 2025
Milton’s Paradise Lost (English 131P)
Course Instructor: Prof. Gordon Teskey, Harvard University, Spring 2025.
Literature Today (English 131)
Course Instructor: Prof. Stephanie Burt, Harvard University, Fall 2024.
Workshops and Guest Lectures
________________________Poetic Form and Poetic Genre: A Workshop
Winthrop House, Harvard University, March 2026
A Harmonious Order: Form and Feeling
Poetry Workshop, James Merrill House, May 2025
Lecture on Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children and Lost in the City
Human 10: Reading for Fiction Writers, Harvard University, November 2025
Lecture on Agha Shahid Ali’s Rooms are Never Finished,
English 10: Literature Today, Harvard University, November 2024
Lecture on Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America,
English 181A: Asian American Literature, Harvard Univesity, October 2022.
Writing Fellow/Instructor
Alekhya Writer’s Retreat, April 2019