The Things of Lost Worlds: Narrative Reconstruction in the Wake of the Holocaust and Al Nakba

How do we construct stories around histories of trauma? And how might these stories&mdash;fictions imagined long after the fact&mdash;help us reconnect with lost pasts and reimagine possible futures? This thesis explores how stuff builds these stories, how the search for language to fill post-traumatic gaps in memory is inextricably bound up with the material world, with the everyday objects that furnished past lives. These domestic relics become a means for narrative, filling in the gaps left by trauma, distance, and time.This project brings together Nicole Krauss's Great House and Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, focusing on the ways their authors use material objects to reconstruct and memorialize pasts to which they do not have direct access. While in both novels attempts to retrieve or restore a prior order to these objects of memory are ultimately frustrated, ritual physical engagement with them engenders as complete a story as is possible in the wake of collective trauma.Building on Michael Rothberg's "multidirectional memory" and "traumatic realism," Edward Said's "contrapuntal reading," and Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," I suggest the notion of &ldquo;traumatic materialism&rdquo;&mdash;an imaginative narrative mode focused on tangible objects and spaces as loci for accessing and reconstructing the lost past&mdash;as a framework to describe and compare the ways narrative fiction by latter-generation writers grapples with the legacies of trauma.</p

Framework for engineering of spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride by focused ion beams

Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is gaining interest as a wide bandgap van der Waals host of optically active spin defects for quantum technologies. Most studies of the spin-photon interface in hBN focus on the negatively charged boron vacancy (VB-) defect, which is typically fabricated by ion irradiation. However, VB- fabrication methods often lack robustness and reproducibility when applied to thin flakes (less than 10 nm) of hBN. Here we identify mechanisms that both promote and inhibit VB- generation and optimize ion beam parameters for site-specific fabrication of optically active VB- centers. We emphasize conditions accessible by high resolution focused ion beam (FIB) systems, and present a framework for VB- fabrication in hBN flakes of arbitrary thickness for applications in quantum sensing and quantum information processing.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure