Postgraduate research students

Scotland was home to one of the first civil-military nuclear power stations, it was on the front line of the Cold War, and it remains the site of the UK’s deterrence system. Nuclear anxiety is foundational to the cultural and political histories of contemporary Scotland, bound up in longer-running debates about land ownership, ecology, and local and national autonomy. Given that this anxiety is substantially speculative, this project proposes a literary history that ranges widely — from Naomi Mitchison to Ewan MacColl, realist novels to Sci-Fi magazines, folk-songs to agitprop theatre, and public information broadcasts to video games.

 This project will utilise ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, and archival research to explore the historical and cultural significance of nuclear anxiety in Scottish literature from 1945 to the present. By focussing on the ways in which Scottish culture has represented, responded to, and influenced the shifting anxieties surrounding nuclear weapons and energy, this project will chart how these anxieties have evolved and have been integral to the political and cultural shaping of Scotland, where existential and geopolitical issues are played out locally.

• Dr Corey Gibson
• Dr Anna McFarlane

SGSAH AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Scholarship, 2025-2029