Depictions of Queer Migrants in Berlin and London in Twenty-First Century Literature and Television

In analysing cultural depictions of queer migration to Berlin and London since the turn of the century, this thesis addresses the increasing political demonisation of marginal groups, particularly ethnic and sexual minorities. The ongoing rightward turn in European and global politics requires an understanding of cultural productions not only as depicting marginal positionalities, such as migrant or queer, but also as providing an imaginative script for living under fraught social and political conditions. The texts analysed in this thesis work towards this end, offering both depictions of the lived experience of queer migration while also providing moments of imagined alternatives to the current reality. While this thesis deals predominately with texts written from the perspective of those on the social margins, it begins with an analysis of two mainstream television crime dramas, Dogs of Berlin and Giri/Haji. In so doing, these series are opened up to queer ways of reading and unsettling preconceived notions of the social worlds in which their characters exist. The utilisation of alternative forms of analysis in this chapter, namely Social Network Analysis, allows for an appraisal of the series’ construction of these social worlds which does not prioritise the hegemonic, but rather allows for the queer migrant characters to be centred. By bringing the liberatory potential of queerness to bear on existing, binary understandings of our social world, it is possible to construct alternative modes of living to those which currently exist. The novels analysed in the latter two chapters of this thesis go some way towards charting a path out of the quagmire of the present political moment for those on the social margins by embracing alternative ways of being in the world. Through an analysis of these texts’ depictions of queer modes of sexual practice, kinship formation and relationality in the cities of Berlin and London, this thesis aims to better understand the role cultural productions can play in imagining new ways of living for those who inhabit marginal social positions

Reading Immunofiction: The Immunitary Unconscious in Contemporary Scottish Writing (1981-2023)

This thesis studies Scottish writing from Thatcher (1981) to the post-pandemic era (2023) in order to construct a theory of immunofiction, a mode of fiction which critically engages with what I call the immunitary unconscious. The latter refers to the ongoing semantic productivity of immunity’s multiple metaphoric borrowings in political and biomedical theory. The immunitary uconscious, I show, has come to define all forms of protection, in the neoliberal era, as being achieved primarily through desocialisation. Using biopolitics, Marxist literary criticism, queer theory, and new materialist philosophies, this thesis examines how contemporary Scottish immunofiction negotiates the immunitary unconscious in order to challenge the contemporary mode of protection as desocialisation. The first two chapters examine novels from the devolutionary era (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998)). Chapter 1 argues that Lanark reverses and literalises immunity’s metaphoric history. It cross-references Hobbes’s concept of immunity, in which exemption from harm is understood to be achieved through the desocialisation of subjects, with early immunology’s concept of immunity, in which health is understood to be achieved through the rejection of nonselves. In doing so, the novel shows how under neoliberalism, immunisation turns autoimmunitary, and how self-protection becomes self-sacrifice. Chapter 2 shows how Filth builds on Lanark’s metaphors of disease, cannibalism, and consumption. Through the figure of the parasite, the novel queers, on the level of both content and form, the protagonist’s body and mode of protection. The tapeworm offers a counternarrative organised around the understanding of a mutual interdependence of host and parasite. Chapter 3 approaches Tamsin Calidas’s I Am An Island (2020) and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016) as heavily automythologised texts which perform allegories of inoculation, in which, like in traditional vaccination, an encounter with negativity produces positivity. I suggest that, in contemporary immunofiction, allegories of inoculation often serve to symbolically resolve the contradiction between an ideology of immunity and our material entanglement. I engage scholarship from the blue humanities and examine the therapeutic role of wild swimming to the narrative development of these texts: what at first is a threatening ocean becomes a symbol of recovery as the protagonists move from depression and addiction to a newfound resilience. In doing so, I show how Locke’s theory of property as an extension of the body informs how these texts deploy both crofts and islands as metaphors for the newly immunised bodies of their characters. The final chapter of this thesis addresses how the climate and pandemic crises challenge the normative conception of the immunised self and its mode of protection. I read Martin MacInnes’s science fiction novel In Ascension (2023) as a text that responds to the contemporary polycrisis by deploying an aesthetics of microbial sublimity that destabilises the ontological primacy of the individual in favour of its existence within a multiplicity of microbial communities. In Ascension, I argue, comes closest to a form of speculative co-immunism that understands protection as a commonised practice shared across species, planetary geographies, and deep time. I conclude the thesis by examining what a co-immunist Scottish literary studies will look like

Against Imperial Extinction Narratives Wildlife, (In)visibility and Temporality in the Moving Image

This thesis interrogates the representation of species extinction and endangerment as mediated through artists’ moving image. It departs from a critique of the anthropocentric gaze, looking and the imperial origins of the camera as dominant in visual animal representations such as the wildlife genre. Consequently, this thesis examines how visual animal representations shape and cement unequal and hierarchical human-wildlife relations of violence, surveillance and control, both materially and visually. It then analyses its corpus, consisting of Carlos Casas’s experimental film Cemetery (2019), Fiona Tan’s film installation Depot (2015) and Kerstin Honeit’s film installation Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards (2018), to argue that these artworks envision a new gaze on wildlife through a focus on framing, (in)visibility and temporality, subverting the objectifying and surveilling anthropocentric gaze. Crucially, this thesis argues that any examination of extinction needs to centralize the colonial and imperial histories of capitalism as long-standing structures that are enabled by and persist on wildlife extraction and destruction. This thesis aims to show the breadth and long-term consequences of these structures in relation to extinction, human-animal relations and visual imaginaries. It aims to do so by engaging with Western imperial institutions of animal display – specifically the rainforest, the natural history museum and the zoo – and conceptualizes these sites as heterotopias of wildlife. Although structural forces of animal extinction are rare in visual representations, the analysis of these artworks demonstrate ways in which this is possible. Revealing the shared characteristic of temporality in extinction and the moving image, this thesis enables a critical examination of the imperial ideology of linear temporality and excavate ways in which both extinction and the moving image can propose heterogeneous temporalities instead. This is opposed to tendencies in extinction studies and discourse that focus on producing environmental affect through species fetishization and commodification, emphasis on individual responsibility or the generalized ‘Anthropocene’, and passive narratives of grief and mourning. This thesis analyses its corpus as evocation of this central argument and approach, proposed as ‘radical extinction studies’

'Green' approaches for chemical synthesis

Synthetic polymers and polymeric materials have become ubiquitous with our daily lives. However, their production often relies on non-environmentally friendly chemical processes, based upon fossil fuel derived energy and toxic organic solvents. With the growing concern for the environmental impact of polymeric material, a transition towards more sustainable and ‘green’ polymer synthesis approaches are necessary. Reversible-deactivation radical polymerisations (RDRPs) processes, particularly atom transfer radical polymerisation (ATRP), pave the way towards more sustainable and practically less demanding polymerisation methods. Atom transfer radical polymerisation (ATRP) is a ‘controlled/living’ technique which enables the synthesise of polymers with well-defined macromolecular characteristics and complex architectures. Advances in this method have enabled polymerisation to proceed with low concentrations of transition metals and often in ‘green’ aqueous conditions. One such advancement is Activators Regenerated by Electron Transfer (ARGET) ATRP. However, conventional ARGET ATRP typically requires a continuous supply of a reducing agents. This study seeks to overcome these challenges by either reducing sugars coupling electrogenic bacteria with ARGET ATRP. Such an approach enables the synthesis of biocompatible polymers in aqueous media, while also investigating correlations between the electrochemical activity of the bacteria and the resulting polymer quality. To investigate this hypothesis, ARGET ATRP was carried out with both gram-negative and gram-positive microorganisms to polymerise the hydrophilic monomer, oligo(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate (OEGMA500). The gram-negative bacteria, Shewanella loihica (S. loihica) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa), and gram-positive bacteria L. monocytogenes demonstrated the ability to facilitate polymerisation with high monomer conversions of 100, 81, and 88% respectively. ARGET ATRP was also performed using ascorbic acid (AA) as the reducing agent to allow direct comparison with state-of-the-art systems. A substantial and sustained negative redox potential ( Eh > −400 mV for 16 h) was measured for both S. loihica and L. monocytogenes, demonstrating the promising potential of these bacteria to effectively modulate the equilibrium of the ATRP reactions for controlled polymer synthesis. In addition, the capacity of reducing sugars to drive controlled ATRP reactions was also evaluated. Reducing sugars, such as glucose, cellobiose and lactose, are often employed as carbon sources to grow electrogenic bacteria. Complete monomer conversion was observed for glucose- and cellobiose-mediated ARGET ATRP. Future work will focus on further optimising these reactions with electrogenic bacteria under aerobic conditions, and using reducing sugars from food waste as alternative/sustainable carbon sources

A Data-driven approach for prioritising and assessing risks of microbial and chemical contaminants in dairy products across Europe

Dairy products play a significant role in global diets, supplying key nutrients like proteins, calcium, and vitamins for people worldwide, with more than six billion individuals relying on dairy products as part of their daily diet. The European Union contributes approximately 160 million tonnes to global milk production annually, highlighting the dairy sector’s broader role beyond nutrition, including its role in livelihoods and the wider economy across the agri-food supply chain. However, the dairy industry faces persistent food safety challenges linked to microbial and chemical contamination, particularly from pathogens like Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella spp., and chemical hazards such as aflatoxins, lead, and cadmium. These risks are exacerbated by climate change, which influences storage temperatures, microbial behaviour, and the conditions under which contamination may flourish or be mitigated. In this thesis, a data-informed approach is developed to assess and prioritise microbial and chemical risks in dairy products across Europe, focusing on environmental and demographic variability. It begins with a detailed review of current food safety risk assessment frameworks, identifying limitations in how climate change is incorporated and examining the utility of open-source databases such as WHO GEMS/Food and RASFF. A prioritisation model was developed using machine learning algorithms, including decision trees and support vector machines, to rank microbial and chemical hazards based on toxicity, prevalence, and exposure. The results identified Listeria monocytogenes, E. coli, and Salmonella spp. as key microbial risks. At the same time, aflatoxin B1, lead, and cadmium were prioritised among chemical contaminants due to their high-risk levels, particularly for vulnerable populations such as children and pregnant women. A Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) model was then applied to explore the impact of variables such as storage temperature, pasteurisation, and consumption practices on microbial risk across four dairy products: milk, cheese, butter, and cream. The baseline risk of E. coli in pasteurised milk was estimated at 2.35 × 10⁻¹², with improper refrigeration shown to significantly increase risk. At the same time, domestic storage conditions associated with climate change were found to elevate the risk of Listeria by up to 30%. In parallel, chemical risk assessments using probabilistic modelling indicated that aflatoxin B1 poses the most serious concern, especially in relation to contaminated animal feed. Nitrates and nitrites, in contrast, exhibited lower risk levels with Margin of Exposure (MOE) values above EFSA’s safe thresholds. These findings were used to inform the development of CheMiRisk, a novel decision support system that integrates microbial and chemical risk data with climate scenario modelling. CheMiRisk was validated with over 90% predictive accuracy and includes features that allow for scenario testing and mitigation strategy evaluation, supporting industry stakeholders and regulators in proactive decision-making. A particular strength of this research lies in its integration of population-specific risk assessments, accounting for the disproportionate burden of exposure faced by sensitive groups. The study also demonstrates how climate-related disruptions in the cold chain, particularly at the domestic level, may influence microbial proliferation and overall food safety. In conclusion, the thesis provides a comprehensive and flexible risk assessment framework that enhances the current state of food safety science. Combining open data, predictive modelling, and climate-informed scenario analysis. This work offers a practical framework for addressing emerging risks in dairy food safety and managing the evolving challenges of microbial and chemical contamination in dairy products, offering valuable guidance for future policy and regulatory strategies.2026-05-18 JG: Author's and/or other hand signatures removed for GDPR complianc

The Guinness family and the shaping of Dublin 1868-1927

This dissertation examines the role the Guinness family played in the shaping of Dublin between the death of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness in 1868 and the passing of his youngest son, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, in 1927. It looks at how the Guinnesses impacted both the city and the county of Dublin not only physically but across the spheres of culture, industry, philanthropy, politics, public health, society, and religion. It is reductive and one dimensional to see the Guinnesses simply as generous fringe figures who selflessly applied their income from making beer to alleviate the malaise that surrounded them. Generous they were and the family did ameliorate the difficult living conditions for many of their fellow citizens, but they were not acting on the fringes. They were major players who worked to place themselves at the centre of the Irish establishment. Their philanthropic initiatives should also be seen as vehicles to achieve their own ambitions and shape public opinion. They were major political actors, often working behind the scenes to maintain the status quo. The rise of threats from within, including Irish nationalism, agitation for land reform, and triumphal Catholicism, mixed with an infiltration of external influences such as leftwing ideologies in the form is socialism and syndicalism combined to bring the Guinness’s world crashing down. The irony is that even as the Guinness family were working to ensconce themselves firmly within the Protestant Ascendancy that world was already slipping away. The central argument of this thesis is that the Guinnesses tried to arrest this decline of by using Dublin as a bulwark, and that even after the achievement of Irish independence in 1922 they aVempted to salvage as many remnants of Ireland’s ancient régime as they could2025-10-23 JG: Author's signature removed from PD

Ephemeral Acts, Enduring Memories: HIV/AIDS and Cultural Memory in Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

This thesis investigates the cultural memory of the AIDS crisis in Ireland, with a particular focus on performance and visual cultures. It interrogates how the legacy of HIV/AIDS is articulated within a culture of “post-crisis” and explores the role of performance in mediating this legacy. Approaching HIV/AIDS through the lens of cultural memory, the thesis examines four Irish works that emerged in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021–2025): Once Before I Go by Phillip McMahon (2021), How to Tell a Secret, directed by Anna Rodgers and Shaun Dunne (2022), PartyScene: Chemsex, Community and Crisis by Philip Connaughton and Phillip McMahon (2022), and the Irish HIV/AIDS Monument Embraced Loop (2023) designed by Anaise Franco and Michael R. DiCarlo. Through these case studies, the thesis analyses how Irish playwrights, choreographers, filmmakers, performers, and cultural institutions have engaged with the memory of HIV/AIDS. The study argues that these works resist closure, instead presenting memory as fluid, continually reshaped by the demands of the present. Rather than imposing a single, coherent account of Irish AIDS memory, the study emphasises its multiplicity and unevenness. The thesis positions Irish performance as a vital site through which the memory of HIV/AIDS is mediated, contested, and reimagined, inviting ongoing critical reflection on the histories of the epidemic as they intersect, unfold, and remain unresolved. In doing so, it contributes to a broader understanding of how Irish AIDS memory is simultaneously shaped by cultural specificities and entangled within global narratives of the virus

Hauntology: Neoliberalism, State-Keynesianism, and Repressed Contradictions in Post-1980 Anglo-American Fiction

This thesis will apply a Marxist, world-ecological framework to the study of the aesthetic mode of hauntology in post-1980 Anglo-American fiction. I argue that hauntology is an aesthetic mode which arises in fiction set within core regions of the capitalist world-system. I contend that hauntological fiction is characterised by a historically specific form of haunting, in which the era of neoliberal conditions is haunted by the period of state-Keynesianism. Hauntological novels are typified by a return to the mid-century from a post-1980 perspective, and this attachment to the mid-century mediates unresolved contradictions. I focus on a number of contradictions, including: the contradiction between capitalism’s promotion of individual self-interest versus the conditions required for total social reproduction; the contradiction between capitalism’s claims to legal equality and freedom versus capitalism’s reliance on forms of inequality and economic coercion; and the contradiction between capitalism’s drive for exponential growth versus ecological limits. Crucially, haunting in hauntological fiction occurs not only from the past but also from the future, particularly from the threat of the impending climate crisis which exposes the unsustainability of both state-Keynesianism and neoliberalism. I argue that reading hauntological fiction can provide an opportunity to re-narrate the mid-century, avoiding conceptions of the relationship between state-Keynesianism and neoliberalism as one of pure rupture or pure continuity. The way in which the mid-century continues to haunt neoliberalism in these novels speaks to how neoliberalism did not simply emerge in opposition to, but built upon, the affects, subjectivities, and institutions created by state-Keynesianism. Simultaneously, hauntological fiction offers an insight into how the affective experience of the transition from state-Keynesianism to neoliberalism was one of rupture and can shed light on how perceptions of a clean break between the two orders have generated a mindset of declinism

Orality and Authorship: African storyteller-authors in the literary marketplace 1938-2024

This thesis examines how African writers, whose work is connected both to oral storytelling and to written literature, navigate the collision of these two conflicting systems. There is an inherent tension between the dynamics of oral tradition, which is communal, intangible and in flux, and the underpinning logic of literary production, which seeks to create standardised texts with stable identifiable origins. I contend that writers who transpose the practices and tenets of oral tradition into the literary sphere, unsettle and defamiliarise the entrenched ideological foundations of contemporary modes of literary creation and publication. This thesis therefore theorises a hybrid artistic identity, the "storyteller-author," to provide an analytical category for writers who bring a storyteller's sensibility to the institutions of authorship. Considering its focus on questions of ownership, originality and artistic hierarchies, this work is critically engaged with the fields of world literature, postcolonial studies and book history, and particularly with scholars working at the intersection of these disciplines (Karin Barber, Sarah Brouillette, Gail Low, Madhu Krishnan, Joseph Slaughter). Methodologically, it also combines close readings with forms of institutional analysis, at times drawing on archival research, in order to remain attentive to how the presence of orality in these author's works is informed by and in conversation with their specific context of textual production. Chapter 1 examines how the Yorùbá language writer D.O. Fágúnwà (1903-1963) foregrounds modes of re-telling and communal exchange in his work, developing a form of authorship that conceives of narrative as encountered rather than created. This reading is situated within the contemporary context of missionary "literature work," to consider how this cultural environment influenced Fágúnwà's authorial self-construction. In Chapter 2, I trace how Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) interacted with three key literary institutions throughout his career, namely the publisher, the archive and the university. In this, I demonstrate how, by approaching these institutions from a storyteller's perspective, he exposes and unsettles the foundational principles of these spaces. Chapter 3 is focused on the novels of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (1967-present): Kintu (2014) and The First Woman (2020), which reveal how oral storytelling can contribute to the conceptual construction of an egalitarian mode of Afropolitanism. In Chapter 4, I turn to a consideration of the relationship between oral tradition and indigenous ontology, examining how Akwaeke Emezi (1987-present) approaches orality as a "spiritfirst" medium of expression, integrating its dynamics into their artistic practice and authorial mode. Finally, in Chapter 5, I identify how the figure of the storyteller has re-emerged in three mediums of secondary orality: AI-generated African folktales on Youtube, African folklore podcasts and spoken word poetry. Through this, I consider how the storyteller-author, as both an artistic category and mode of reading, can provide a critical framework for analysing transitory and multimodal forms of verbal art which are increasingly prominent in the contemporary cultural landscape

Development of a High-Average Radiance Soft X-ray Light Source

This thesis presents the iterative development of a table-top (TT) laser-produced plasma (LPP) light source optimised for high average radiance in the soft x-ray (SXR) region. The system employed a solid molybdenum target and exhibited peak emission within the water window (WW) region. Plasma generation was driven by a diode-pumped λ = 1064 nm Nd:YAG laser delivering 5 ns pulses (full width at half maximum, FWHM) with an energy of 37.5 mJ at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. Focusing these pulses with a 100 mm lens produced LPP SXR emission diameters (averaged over 100 shots) of approximately 22 μm and 13 μm (FWHM) along the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively, corresponding to an estimated radiance of 5×10¹⁰ photons/s/mm²/mrad² at 2.74 nm and 0.1% relative bandwidth (BW). This prototype addresses key challenges in solid target light-source development and paves the way for a design capable of achieving radiance up to two orders of magnitude greater. Realising this increase requires relatively straightforward improvements to the focusing optics and target stability. The compact design relies on helium buffer gas as the primary debris mitigation mechanism to protect nearby optical components. This approach necessitated the integration of a 100 nm thick silicon nitride membrane (SNM), positioned in close proximity to the LPP, to serve as a helium-vacuum interface transmissive to SXR radiation. To shield both the SNM and the laser focusing lens from particulate debris, a set of novel components was developed to manipulate particle trajectories through interaction with high-velocity gas flows. These components were designed using a three-dimensional (3D) particle drag force model, coupled with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the surrounding environment. The final configuration demonstrated stable collection of SXRs from the LPP, transmitted through the SNM at a 2.7° collection angle, over a continuous 4 hour period. This duration represents a substantial fraction of the expected daily operational cycle for TT light sources intended for imaging, patterning, and spectroscopy applications