Jessica Swoboda received her B.A. (Honors) in English and Humanities from Villanova University and her M.A. in English from Boston College. Her dissertation explores how characters’ interactions with various artistic mediums in novels by Rachel Cusk, Siri Hustvedt, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf deepen and enrich the intersubjective dimensions of theories of attention, attunement, acknowledgment, and recognition. Jess’s work has been recognized by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, where she was a Fellow from 2019-2021. In 2019, she was recipient of an Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Summer Research Fellowship from UVA, and throughout her time at UVA, she has received three Summer Research Grants from the English Department. In the Spring of 2021, Jess was awarded a fellowship from PhD+ to pursue an internship with The Point in the Fall of 2021 as well as a Double Hoo Grant with UVA undergraduate Anne Kickert ’24 to undertake a research project on the ineffability of aesthetic experience. Jess’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Point (“Practicing Acknowledgment”), Textual Practice (“How We Argue”), and ASAP/J (“On Attunement”). She is also Head Copy Editor for New Literary History.