Saffy’s thesis, entitled “I Am A[n Extraordinary] Man: The Intimate Suffering of Russianness and Blackness”, examines Fyodor Dostoevsky’s influence on twentieth-century African American literature. It argues that Dostoevsky’s formal representation of fractured selfhood provided a generative model for articulating racialised subjectivity. In doing so, it identifies a shared existential grammar through which African American authors transformed racial injury into artistic, philosophical, and spiritual innovation. Her research was supervised by Dr Sarah Young and Dr Xine Yao.