Sara Lopes Borga

Thesis Title: The Expanding Universal: Encounters with the Plural in Contemporary Black American Women's Poetry

Supervisors: Prof Nicole King and Prof Erica McAlpine

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. My research is funded by the Oxford-Drue-Heinz St John’s Graduate Scholarship.

Research Interests: Twentieth- and twenty-first century American Literature, African American Literature, Caribbean Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Aesthetics, and Critical Theory.
 

I have a background in art practice and a sustained interest in the intersection of literature with art and visual culture. Coming from Portugal, I am also drawn to comparative approaches that bring Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures into dialogue with Anglophone traditions.

Teaching: I welcome any teaching on literature from 1910 to the present, particularly in areas connected to my research interests above.

I have taught a course on James Baldwin's essays and fiction, and have led classes and tutorials for Paper 4 (1910–Present). I have also served as a Teaching Assistant for FHS Paper 6 options on nineteenth-century American literature and the uses of the first person in literature, criticism, theory and philosophy.

I have supervised undergraduate dissertations on topics such as:

• Narrative authority in Toni Morrison's Jazz and James Baldwin's Another Country
• Artifice and theatricality in Sylvia Plath's Ariel
• Psychedelic experience and epistolary form in William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yagé Letters

I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).

Publications:

• ‘”Impractical” and “Unsummarizable”: the terms of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry’, Special Issue, Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (forthcoming, Spring 2027) 

Conference Papers:

• ‘Poetry, Delyricised: the Formal and Moral Stakes of Claudia Rankine’s Poetic Address’, British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Glasgow (forthcoming, Spring 2026) 
• ‘”Impractical” and “Unsummarizable”: the Terms of Tracy K. Smith’s Poetry’, Contemporary Poetics, Communities and Publics, European Association of American Studies Poetry Network Symposium, University of Göttingen (2025)