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 North-American poetry studies, aesthetics, and critical theory to examine the formal qualities that are lost to polarised debates regarding ‘the social’ versus ‘the literary’ within the work of minoritised poets in the U.S. Specifically, I am examining the work of Tracy K. Smith, Claudia Rankine, and José Antonio Rodríguez, whose poetry, I argue, is distinctly attuned to the possibility of alternative humanisms and lyric subjectivities. Before starting my DPhil, I completed an MA in Literary Studies from Goldsmiths (UL), an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), and a BA in Painting from the University of Lisbon, where I am from.