The goal of this PhD project is to develop highly ordered and structurally stable molecular devices. The growth of thermally and mechanically stable molecular nanostructures is a major challenge for retaining the quantum mechanical properties of molecules in real-world and demanding environments. This is especially important in nanoelectrical devices where heat and stress can damage the molecular structure, causing device failure. This PhD project aims to overcome this challenge by developing new methods for step-by-step (atom-by-atom) on-surface synthesis of covalently stabilised molecular wires and devices. Achieving this goal will address a major outstanding challenge in translating functional molecular polymers to technologically relevant materials.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Student studies taught MRes modules before selecting a PhD topic later in 2025.

Our failure to respond to ecological collapse is made worse by our increasing disconnection from the natural world. Arguably, this disconnection has increased as a result of our increasing connection to the digital, as habitual internet use not only keeps us indoors, but satisfies our innate "biophilia", or need to feel immersed in an environment (Matei, 2017). However, this line of thinking could perpetuate a "systematic bias to see the digital and physical as separate", a fallacy Nathan Jurgenson (2011) calls digital dualism. He argues that online and offline are not separate or self-contained realms, but are instead "increasingly meshed" into one "augmented reality". In this augmented reality, digital media, man-made objects, and organic structures all belong to the natural world. The digital and physical co-exist, but in incompatible mediums. What this project proposes is an attempt to cross-pollinate, to recalibrate, so that we can consider the physical and virtual in equal measure. The internet is the most ubiquitous, artificial, and perhaps most inhabited environment on the planet. It's the environment I'm most at home in, and I suspect many contemporary poetry readers feel the same. When writing to engage with the natural world, using the internet as a portal not only removes any man-made or mental barriers to ecological engagement, it also feels more natural. Today especially, when 'nature' is encountered increasingly as digitally-enhanced online content (Miles, 2021), it would be artificial to ignore the technology which mediates between humanity and our environment. However, there is an obstacle to considering our digital and physical environments simultaneously - we conceive of the internet as existing only in theory, as a "cloud" of information in some kind of ether, whereas the natural world is overwhelmingly tangible. In reality, the internet's physical presence in the form of server farms, satellites, masts, and undersea cables is incredibly tangible, and not to mention harmful to the environment. (Bridle, 2020) Our increasing dependence on digital technology (exacerbated during the pandemic) keeps us indoors, seemingly separated from the natural world. Because of this dependency, our ability to conceive of tangible non-human environments is rapidly fading. (Freeman, 2009) As over-reliance on the internet accelerates carbon emissions (Griffiths, 2020), it simultaneously turns the world we're destroying into an abstract concept.

Objectives and Methodology: This thesis will break new ground in the study of Israeli/Palestinian literature as it circulates internationally. I will demonstrate how violence has been, and remains, legible in Israeli/Palestinian literature as a mode of representation crucial to robust national identity, and yet one that is predicated on a destructive division of peoples. Understanding violence as a multifaceted phenomenon will enable me to identify forms of structural and symbolic violence that subtend more explicit, manifest, or what Slavoj Zizek (2008) calls 'subjective' forms of violence. Moreover, by reconceiving subjective violence as a 'speech act' (Ball, 2012), I will elucidate what is being said, what sort of response is solicited, and who the interlocutor is in contextually specific acts of violence. By creatively synthesising theories of national narration and affect, with a particular emphasis on gender, I will develop a distinctive approach to violence that attends to its effects on the skin of fiction that mediates the Israeli/Palestinian conflict internationally. Four overarching questions will govern my research: 1. How is fiction (non-)complicit in nationalist narratives in terms of its approach to violence? 2. In what ways are literary representations of violence gendered, and how does that reflect and inform national identity? 3. How might literature's potential for inducing affect augment, or challenge, existing postcolonial approaches to Israeli/Palestinian literature? 4. How might a critical approach towards representational violence contribute to non-violent "solutions" to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? Rationale: My doctoral thesis will shed fresh light on the controversial topic of violence as this has been represented, in explicit and more subtle ways, in the post-1948 literatures of Israel and Palestine. It will represent a distinctive response to recent appeals to furnish the 'nowhere', or near invisibility, of Israel/Palestine in postcolonial studies (Williams & Ball, 2014). The work will specifically advance the argument that Palestinian and Israeli texts 'share the effort to represent the nation [which] offers a way to conceive of a relational literary history of Israel/Palestine' (Bernard, 2013). My relational approach emphatically departs from the limiting idea of two parallel but separate narratives, instead drawing upon an inclusive paradigm of decolonising 'settler-native relations' that favours bipartisan solidarity (Piterberg, 2008). Yet ongoing discord still needs to be confronted. When assessing claims to belonging in Israel/Palestine we face the 'problem of determining what the appropriate timeframe is for analysing significant historical events' (Peterson, 2016). Nations, like narratives, are created through processes of inclusion and exclusion; thus, narrative 'closure' risks replicating 'the totalisation of national culture' (Bhabha, 1990). At least when literature is interpreted allegorically (Jameson, 1981), it becomes implicated in propaganda designed to endorse a nation's 'soul' (Renan, 1895). My relational comparative approach aims both to sustain attention to the region's ongoing tensions and to heed the constructive call for an 'analytic pluralism' (Said, 1983). A comparative methodology is crucial to my research because where particular histories are privileged, divisions are demarcated, and violence thrives. Since 1948 (when the State of Israel was declared), division and violence have proliferated within what is recognisably a colonial context. Encirclement, military incursion, resource diversion, toponymicide, memoricide, and linguicide are ongoing existential threats to Palestinians (Masalha, 2012). Conversely, the annexation of trauma studies, historical censorship, and the perpetual Othering of Arabs threaten Israel's psyche and legitimation (Pappe, 2006).