Our partnership with Edinburgh International Book Festival continues this year with a pre-Festival residency for Sophie Gee.

Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University, and co-host of the Secret Life of Books, a much-loved and internationally acclaimed podcast about classic literature. Sophie’s most recent book is The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World, about how eating rituals across the eighteenth-century globe reveal an untold story about the rise of the novel.

Sophie lives between New York and Sydney. From 2024-25 she was the inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney, and now co-leads the Eleos Collaboration in the Humanities. This program focuses on the arts and humanities as foundational to the purpose and value of universities. Sophie speaks worldwide at arts and literary festivals about why books and humanities matter.

At Princeton she teaches literary history from Beowulf to the Jane Austen, as well as classes on contemporary fiction and creative writing. She’s the author of scholarly monographs and a widely translated and acclaimed historical novel. She writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review, the TLS, and the Sydney Morning Herald, among other places.