Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. He is a member of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science, Committee on Jewish Studies, and Committee on the History of Culture. For 25 years Gilman was also a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University. During 1990-91 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, and during 1996-97 he was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.

Gilman has been a visiting professor at numerous universities both in the United States and abroad, including at Syracuse, Colgate, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Cape Town, and the University of Potsdam. In addition, he was the Old Dominion Fellow in the Department of English at Princeton University, the inaugural Drobny Professor in Jewish Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow.

President of the Modern Language Association in 1995, Gilman was awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997. He was the first non-historian to be awarded the Mertes Prize of the German Historical Institute (1997) and the first non-German-born Germanist to be awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize (1998) of the Humboldt Foundation.