Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

by Sophie Gee

208 pages, Paperback

Expected publication February 24, 2026

About the author

Sophie Gee was born in Sydney in 1974 and grew up in Paddington. She attended the University of Sydney, where she graduated in 1995 with a first-class honors degree in English. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on Evelyn Waugh, still one of her favorite writers.

After university, Sophie won a scholarship to Harvard, where she did a Ph.D. in English literature. She wrote her doctoral thesis about filth, pollution and satire in the eighteenth century. She graduated from Harvard in 2002 and in fall of that year she was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on eighteenth-century literature from Milton to Jane Austen, as well as on the history of satire. She lectures on subjects ranging from The Canterbury Tales to South Park and Catch-22. In 2006 she was named the John E. Annan Bicentennial Preceptor, in recognition of outstanding research and teaching as a member of Princeton's junior faculty, and her first scholarly book is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Before writing The Scandal of the Season Sophie published academic essays on Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and others, as well as articles and book reviews of general interest both in Australia and America. Sophie has been awarded academic fellowships at UCLA, Yale and the Huntington Library and she has been a visiting teacher at University College London.

Sophie lives in Brooklyn and she returns regularly to Australia to spend time with her family.