Sara Lopes Borga

I am a DPhil candidate in English at St John’s college, where I hold the Drue Heinz Graduate Scholarship. My research engages with contemporary American poetry, aesthetics, and critical theory to examine the formal qualities that are lost to polarised debates regarding ‘the social’ and ‘the literary’ within the work of Black American poets. Specifically, I examine the work of Tracy K. Smith, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley, whose poetry, I argue, is distinctly and variously attuned to an aesthetics of plurality that calls for a reconfiguration of critical discourses. 

Before starting my DPhil, I completed an MA in Literary Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and a BA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon (FBAUL), Portugal.