Sophie Gee is Advocating for the Importance of Arts and Humanities

Sophie Gee has always regarded her role as an academic as much larger than instructing students in a classroom. In public lectures and op-eds, she has advocated for the importance of studying the arts and humanities as a key to human problem-solving. “Far from the sun setting on humanities, it’s actually the moment where it becomes more important than ever,” she says. “We need to keep learning how to be human.”

She has recently taken on a new role in which she is examining and promoting the centrality of higher education. Until 2027, Gee is spending half the year as the inaugural vice-chancellor’s fellow at her alma mater, the University of Sydney, where she leads an initiative to use the arts and humanities to move beyond social polarization and find ways to work across differences. Gee has spearheaded a series of workshops, symposia, and other projects for the University of Sydney community that promote skills such as disagreeing well and reexamining one’s preconceptions.

Amid escalating public criticism of universities, Gee is seeking to demonstrate their importance as “unique institutions that bring together people in almost every human endeavor.”

While she relishes her new role, she still loves her time in the classroom, where she teaches British and global Anglophone literature from the 17th and 18th centuries. “Novels give a pathway to people’s inner lives and create intimacy between people even when they are unalike,” she says. “And that feels incredibly relevant.”

Quick Facts

Title
Associate Professor of English

Time at Princeton
23 years 

Recent Class
Truth and Imagination: Writing Fiction, Writing History

Gee's Research: A Sampling

 

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Mikel Casal

 

Stepping Out

Gee is working on a nonfiction book titled Undisciplined that explores the idea that academics use their expertise most effectively when they move outside of their discipline. “I love the counterintuitiveness of that idea: that our training can sometimes have the most impact when we step outside the field,” she says. The project grew from Gee’s interactions with people in other disciplines, which prompted her to think in new ways about the purpose of studying literature and training in the skills of humanities. “It’s not entirely comfortable, but I would make the case that after working hard to train in your discipline, it’s incredibly important to bring that knowledge to other fields and let other disciplines change my knowledge.”

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Mikel Casal

Sharing a Meal

Her forthcoming book expected in spring 2026, The Barbarous Feast: Writing and Eating in the Eighteenth-Century World, is an interdisciplinary story about how people across the colonial world in Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Australia understood their internal, private selves, and how they connected with the inner lives of others. Some of the most powerful ways of connecting were writing and telling stories. But often storytelling wasn’t written or verbal. Stories were transmitted through religious rituals or by sharing a meal together. “Eating rituals around the globe in the 18th century were often ways to assert and protect people’s interior lives,” she says. The book explores practices such as poaching wild animals, growing tropical fruit, and eating grave dirt — an African and Afro-Caribbean ritual around truth-telling.

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Mikel Casal

Talking Books

In 2024, Gee started a podcast called Secret Life of Books, which reveals the hidden stories behind many of the world’s most beloved books. The weekly episodes, which Gee co-hosts with Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC, are dedicated to keeping the classics relevant for modern audiences. So far, the podcast has tackled venerated classics such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Go Tell It on The Mountain alongside recent works Wolf Hall and My Name Is Lucy Barton. “There’s an infectious joy in sharing books,” Gee says. “I love taking books out of the classroom and giving them to people in ways they can enjoy and find both rich and rigorous.”