Spring 2022 — The Nassau Literary Review

Sophie Gee is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at Princeton University. She specializes in the literature of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century and the imaginative cultures of England and its colonized territories.

Her first scholarly book was a literary and intellectual history of eighteenth-century waste. Her debut novel, The Scandal of the Season, was a comedy of manners set in eighteenth-century London, and a retelling of Pope’s "The Rape of the Lock." The novel was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the Economist and has been published in 13 countries.

Currently she’s completing a second novel entitled Mysteries of the Invisible World, about eighteenth-century scientists, ghosts, gold mines, textiles, time-travel and true love.

She coordinates a group at Princeton called “Mindful Faculty,” focused on developing new approaches to teaching and scholarship that emerge from mindfulness and other contemplative practices which cultivate non-judgmental presence and embodied awareness.

Mark Thomas Gibson's personal lens on American culture stems from his multipartite viewpoint as an artist—as a black male, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of painting and drawing, revealing a vision of a dystopic America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.

Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Loyal in Stockholm. In 2016, he co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. Gibson has released two artist books, Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017).

In 2021, Gibson was awarded residencies at Yaddo and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. He was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia, PA and a Hodder Fellowship from Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.