Born in Sydney in 1974, Sophie Gee was brought up and educated in the inner-city suburb of Paddington, graduating from the University of Sydney in 1995 with a first-class honours degree in English. She won a scholarship to Harvard, where she wrote a doctoral thesis about pollution, filth and satire in eighteenth-century London. She received a PhD in 2002 and was immediately appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Princeton. Recently she held a research fellowship at UCLA and has recently taught at University College London before returning to Princeton.