Sophie Gee is inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney, co-leading the Campus Collaboration initiative, amplifying public trust in university communities and academic knowledge. Her focus is on the social impact of arts and humanities. She speaks worldwide at arts and literary festivals about why books and humanities matter more than ever. 

Sophie is also a professor of English at Princeton University, where she teaches literary history from Beowulf to Jane Austen, as well as classes on contemporary fiction and creative writing. She’s the author of scholarly monographs about the origins of the novel and the history of waste in the eighteenth century, and the widely translated and acclaimed historical novel The Scandal of the Season. 

She writes regularly for The New York Times, the TLS, the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald, among other places. 

Her Ph.D. in English is from Harvard, where she received awards for teaching and scholarship. She has held fellowships at Yale and UCLA. 

Sophie is co-host of The Secret Life of Books, a weekly podcast about the history and ongoing relevance of classic literature. The podcast is regularly the #1 books podcast in both Australia and the UK. She is on the Board of Red Room Poetry, Australia’s largest poetry and education non-profit, and the advisory committee to the Board of Primary Ethics, Australia’s leading ethics education program for schools.