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Sophie Grace Chappell has been Professor of Philosophy at The Open University since 2006. Before that she was Reader in Philosophy at the University of Dundee (1998-2006), and before that she held posts at Wolfson College, Oxford (1991-1994), Merton College, Oxford (1992-1994), UEA (1994-1996), and Manchester (1996-1998). Her main interests in philosophy are ethics, the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of sex and gender, ancient and mediaeval philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of religion.
She has published over 100 articles. Her books include; Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom; Understanding Human Goods; The Inescapable Self; Reading Plato’s Theaetetus; Ethics and Experience; Knowing What To Do; Songs For Winter Rain; and Epiphanies: an Ethics of Experience
Sophie Grace wrote Epiphanies with the support of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2017-2020. Sophie Grace is now pursuing a number of different writing projects, mostly on the ethics of virtue. The biggest thing she is currently engaged with is a new book: Trans Figured: How to survive as a transgender person in a cisgender world.
Sophie Grace Chappell was Director of the Scots Philosophical Club 2003-2006, a Governor of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy 2012-2018, and Treasurer of the Mind Association 2000-2021. Since 2021 she has been Executive Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly. She is a member of the REF Sub-Panel for Philosophy 2022.
Sophie Grace Chappell is (as far as she knows) the first openly transgender philosophy professor in the UK; she transitioned in autumn 2014. (She has no objection to having her work from before her transition cited in her previous name.)
She likes cycling, skiing, ski-mountaineering, hillwalking, and climbing (but not falling off). She is a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, with over 50 FWAs to her name. She has translated some of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, and Rilke into English verse, and is engaged in long-term projects to translate the Iliad and the Divina Commedia. She dreams of someday being good enough at the piano to be heard in public. She is married with four children, and is a long-term member of All Souls’ Episcopalian Church, Dundee.