Abigail Schofield (AS): We’ll start with an easy question. Can you introduce yourself, tell me a bit about your current role at the English department in UVA?
Jess Swoboda (JS): I'm a Jefferson Fellow in the English department, and I just defended my dissertation at the end of February! Next year I'll be a postdoctoral fellow in the Engagements Program here at UVA. I'm looking forward to that. I really love working with first years, so I'm excited to be able to do that again.
AS: Could you tell me a bit about your dissertation topic. What led you to this topic? What is your greatest takeaway from your research and how does it inform your understanding of women and gender?
JS: In my dissertation, I look at contemporary art novels written by women. Those authors are Siri Hustvedt, Rachel Cusk, Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith. By art novel, I mean a novel that has some sort of aesthetic engagement in it. Whether it's writing or painting or reading or just going to a museum or going to a poetry reading. And I look at two things in my dissertation. The first is how characters' interactions with these different types of art in these novels impact their interpersonal connections. In other words, how aesthetic experience can impact interpersonal experiences. I make the argument that aesthetic experience can change our perceptions in such a way that it then changes how we see other people and can improve connections for the better.
And then the second thing has to do with contemporary methodological debates in literary studies. There's a big debate at present between what's called critique and what's called postcritique. Critique is essentially unpacking and unveiling a text’s ideological underpinnings. Postcritique involves asking what a text is revealing to you as you read. What kind of affective response is it generating? Do you recognize yourself in the text’s characters? What does that recognition reveal? How can those types of first-person experiences improve our interpretations of texts? These debates are centered on how critics relate to their objects of study. I am the postcritique side. I mean, my dissertation is entitled “Postcritical Relations,” if that’s any indication.
I develop the postcritical perspective by arguing that the art novels I study, most especially their descriptions of characters’ aesthetic experiences, contribute to these debates that we're having in literary studies on methodology by bringing to the fore their interpersonal implications. I suggest that how we do our work as critics has interpersonal connection, has interpersonal implications, and can actually improve or fracture our interpersonal connections that we have as scholars. So that's the dissertation in the nutshell. And you asked about what led me to this topic, right?
AS: Right.
JS: The journey to this point was an interesting one. Back in 2020, a book that falls on the postcritique side came out, and soon after it was published, this really horrible, egregious, totally baseless review of it came out and it really unsettled me. And that review also confirmed a lot of my suspicions about academia—that we forget that what we do is inherently interpersonal and that there are fundamental problems with how we engage each other as scholars. And that review itself was emblematic of these things that I had been feeling, and it provided proof that my hunch was right.
I wrote an essay for a public magazine that defended post critique, and I was totally eviscerated on Twitter by a handful of senior scholars. One person blocked me after I'd asked him to clarify why he thought of my article as a joke. Another person questioned my intelligence. Another person said I was precisely the problem with literary studies. It was horrible, but it also just confirmed what I had been feeling and sensing about academia. And so that was the moment that my dissertation totally changed. It's like, okay, no, this project has to be about how aesthetic experiences impact interpersonal ones and about how we argue as scholars. That’s how I got there.
And then as for how it informs my understanding of women and gender. All of the novels I write on are by women. What I think draws me to these novels is the fact that they are all featuring some woman either struggling to create art or grappling with the aftermath of the publication of that art or the release of that art. These novels are showing that gender bias still very much exists in the world and what pressures women are experiencing--whether it's their domestic fiction being dismissed as trite while their male counterparts are celebrated for producing the same fiction. Or whether it's that they aren't going on all these literary tours because they have children to take care of at home. Or if a woman has this really intellectual novel that she is writing, it's dismissed as like just too highbrow. Whereas with a man, it’s like, “Oh, this is the most brilliant thing ever being written.”
The novelists I study also write essays about their own experiences in the art and literary world. So, for instance, Siri Hustvedt, who is married to the writer Paul Auster, has an essay in her recent collection where she recalls an experience at an event with her husband. An audience member had asked her husband if he was the real intellectual in the family and if he had taught Siri all she knew about Bahktin. And he replies no, actually, Siri is the intellectual, and almost everything I know about theory I’ve learned from her.
That scene really captures the problems inherent in how women are received as both thinkers and writers. A lot of my work then is sort of contributing to that in the sense of it's trying to push against it and show why women are so valuable and brilliant, because brilliance is not a word that's usually attached to women.
AS: Your research is so fascinating. I'm in awe and I'm inspired and I'm now ready to go write my thesis which is also women-focused.
JS: Thank you. That’s great to hear.
AS: Next question, you kind of touched on it, which is really great. Could you expand on what your hope is for super scholars and researchers, specifically women in your field? Especially now, as someone who's just finished her dissertation and been in a PhD program, in academia, for a while now.
JS: I think there are two parts to this answer. The first is I want to see more women researchers being celebrated and called brilliant. Usually “brilliance” is just something reserved for their male colleagues. But if we peel back the biases, we will see that women are powerhouses, they're forces to be reckoned with, and we need to take that seriously. And then the second thing would be that right now universities are hiring adjuncts more than tenure-track professors. Adjuncts are paid a very small amount for their work and get no benefits, no health insurance, no 401k, no paid maternity leave.
The move toward adjunctification really impacts women because it delays their decision to have children, if that's something that they want. If they do have children during the time that they're an adjunct, they have no healthcare or they have to hopefully have a spouse they can get healthcare through. Their time off work isn't compensated. It's such a financial burden to have children in general and especially when you’re an adjunct. My hope is that universities are going to create more tenure track jobs. More jobs with resources and benefits means more women will have the financial resources and supports to have children.
AS: The next question touches again on you being at a really cool place, where you're about to finish your time as a PhD student. What piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
JS: Yeah, this is something I've been thinking a lot about recently, now that I've come to the end. It's like, oh God, what would I have told first year Jess? And I think it is: stop second guessing everything you do and everything you think. It’s not going to get you anywhere. It's only going to cause you more problems and more headaches and more stress and more anxiety. It's also only going to waste your time and energy. Trust your instincts and your skills and have confidence in both. That's something I think I would tell myself, but also people just starting out in grad school too.
AS: Now for my last main question. We're conducting this interview in celebration of Women's History Month. If you could have lunch with any woman in history, who would it be and what would you want to talk about?
JS: I think Billie Jean King, the world-renowned tennis player who helped pave the way for female athletes and was a pioneer in women’s sports. I was a field hockey player in college, and I'm still really really invested in women's sports. Billie Jean King would be ideal for me to have lunch with because she showed the world that women are powerful, strong, and excellent athletes. And she showed that we deserve to be taken seriously.
She was also pivotal to the implementation of Title IX. She made it possible for me and so many others to compete at the highest levels in our respective sports. I would want to talk to her more about what can be done with Title IX. Because as it stands women-centered sports in the US, such as field hockey, are still at a disadvantage materially, physically, and psychologically because there's no male counterpart. The NCAA usually interprets Title IX as “Okay, equality and equity in women's sports means giving them whatever the men's teams already have.” But with sports like field hockey, there are no men's teams in high schools or universities. The measuring stick for equality and equity doesn't work there. And so I would want to talk to Billie Jean King about how we navigate that. How do we continue the growth of women's sports while also reinventing the standards by which equality and equity are measured?
AS: She's still here so hopefully you'll get your opportunity.
JS: Maybe this interview will be the thing.
AS: Alright. And before you go, we have four fun, lighting round questions for you. First, what's something you enjoy doing that makes you lose track of time?
JS: Cooking.
AS: Cooking. Anything in particular that you like cooking?
JS: My dad recently got me the pasta attachments for my KitchenAid mixer. I've been making homemade pasta lately. I find it an extremely therapeutic process.
AS: What is your best “hot take”?
JS: Women make better athletes than men.
AS: Let's leave it there. <laugh> Next, what is your comfort movie or TV show?
JS: Most recently it's been the Golden Girls. I've been rewatching it as I've been finishing my dissertation and it's comforting in every sense.
AS: And then last question, very fitting for an English student, what is your favorite author and why?
JS: Siri Hustvedt. Everything of hers that I read changes how I see and think about the world. I think the best writers are able to do that. And she certainly does.
AS: Very nice. Well, thank you so much for, of course, your time and doing this.
JS: Thank you again.
This interview was conducted via Zoom by Abigail Schofield, Senior Intern on the Director’s Team at the UVA Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center.