Sander Gilman

Sander L. Gilman (born 1944) is an American cultural and literary historian, who is particularly well-known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. Gilman obtained his B.A. in German language and literature from Tulane University in 1963, where he proceeded to gain his Ph.D., also in German, in 1968. As of 2005 he is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over seventy books.

His Oxford lectures Multiculturalism and the Jews appeared in 2006; his most recent edited volume, a special issue of History of Psychiatry on Mind and Body in the History of Psychiatry, appeared in that same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

He has been the Northrop Frye Visiting Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Toronto (Canada), the Old Dominion Fellow in the Department of English at Princeton University, the Visiting B. G. Rudolph Professor of Jewish Studies at Syracuse University, the inaugural Drobny Professor in Jewish Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, the Nichols Visiting Professor of the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of California, Irvine and the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University. He also served as a visiting professor at Colgate University, Tulane University, the University of Paderborn (Germany), the Free University of Berlin (Germany), the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), the Ohio State University, the University of Cape Town (South Africa), the University of Potsdam (Germany), the University of British Columbia (Canada), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), the University of Sussex (UK), University College London (UK); and as a Guggenheim Fellow. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995. He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997 and elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin.