Sander Gilman

Sander L. Gilman (born 1944) is an American cultural and literary historian, [http://www.psp.emory.edu/SanderGilman/index.html] who is particularly well-known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over seventy books.

Gilman’s focus is on medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in social and political discourse. In particular, Gilman investigates the constellations of medical, social, and political discourse that emerge at certain historical junctures.

Academic career

Gilman obtained his B.A. degree in German language and literature from Tulane University in 1963, where he proceeded to gain his Ph.D. degree, also in German, in 1968. As of 2005 he is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis as well as of Emory University’s Health Sciences Humanities Initiative.

For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University from 1969 to 1994 where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years (1994-2000) 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 (2000-05) 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 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Nichols Visiting Professor of the Humanities and the Public Sphere at 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. In 2007 he was appointed Professor, Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College (London)and a Visiting Fellow of the new Institute of Advanced Studies, Warwick University, UK. 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, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and made an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2008.

Writing

His "Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity" appeared in 2008; his most recent edited volume, "Race and Contemporary Medicine: Biological Facts and Fictions" was published 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.

Freud

He has examined Sigmund Freud, addressing the question of what role, if any, was played by Freud’s Jewish origins in his composition of the psychoanalytic corpus. Gilman’s thesis concerning this subject is that the prejudices of biology in the nineteenth century classified the Jew as being somehow feminine, a stigma that Freud sought to escape by carving out a scientific niche of his own. Licensed by his own brand of science, Freud could simultaneously lay claim to the manhood that the Viennese scientific establishment of the nineteenth century threatened to deny him, and also to the neutrality that was the warrant of its authority.

To make the case that contemporaneous anti-Semitism shaped Freud’s thought, Gilman provides a catalogue of the most egregious anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time and place, including straightforward documentation of certain anti-Semitic prejudices, such as the belief in Jewish male menstruation, [Gilman, Sander. "Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul". 1998, page 86.] as well as period depictions of anti-Semitic stereotypes in graphic media.

Publications

Monographs

A1 "Form und Funktion: Eine strukturelle Untersuchung der Romane Klabunds" (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenaeum, 1971).

A2 "The Parodic Sermon in European Perspective: Aspects of Liturgical Parody from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century" (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1974; Philadelphia: Coronet Books, 1974).

A3 "Bertold Brecht’s Berlin" (New York: Doubleday, 1975; London: Abelard-Schuman, 1976; Anchor Paperback, 1977; Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Simon, 1981). (with Wolf Von Eckardt).

A3a Reprint of "Bertold Brecht’s Berlin" with a new introduction, “Berlin Dreams the Dream of the Twenties: Thoughts after the Wall,” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. xi-xxv.

A3a1 "A Berlim de Bertolt Brecht: Um Album dos Anos 20". Trans. Alexandre Lissovsky. (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio, 1996).

A4 "Nietzschean Parody: An Introduction to Reading Nietzsche" (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976; Toyko: Seido Sha, 1997).

A4a Second, augmented edition (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2001).

A5 "The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Rise of Psychiatric Photography" (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976; Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1977; Tokyo: Seiwa, 1980).

A6 "Wahnsinn, Text und Kontext: Die historischen Wechselbeziehungen der Literatur, Kunst und Psychiatrie." Literatur und Psychologie, 8, ed. Wolfram Mauser (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1981).

A7 "On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany". Yale Afro-American Studies (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

A8 "Seeing the Insane: A Cultural History of Psychiatric Illustration" (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1982; Behavioral Science Book Club, 1982; Psychotherapy and Social Science Book Club, 1982; WileyPaperback, 1985; Athens: Grammata Editions, forthcoming; Beijing: Horizon Media Company, forthcoming).

A8a Excerpted in The Mind (York: Impressions Gallery, 1987): 5-16.

A8b Reprint of Seeing the Insane with a new afterward (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 225-35.

A9 "Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness" (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985; second edition, 1986; paperback edition, 1986; second paperback edition, 1988; third paperback edition, 1990; fourth paperback edition, 1992; Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, forthcoming).

A9a Excerpted in The Oxford Readers: Sexuality (Oxford University press, forthcoming).

A10 "Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986; Johns Hopkins paperback, 1990; edited and revised German edition: Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993).

A10a Portuguese translation of Chapter One in Nelson H. Vieira, ed., Construindo a imagem do judeu (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1994): 31- 64.

A11 "Oscar Wilde’s London" (New York: Doubleday, 1987; London: Michael O’Mara, 1989, 1997; Book of the Month Club, 1989). (with Wolf Von Eckardt and J. E. Chamberlin)

A12" Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS" (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988; paperback edition, 1988; second edition, 1991; second paperback edition, 1991; Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993).

A12a Japanese translation with a new afterward (Tokyo: Arino Shobo, 1996), pp. 449-52.

A13 "Goethe’s Touch: Touching, Seeing, and Sexuality". The Andrew W. Mellon Lecture for 1988 (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1988).

A13a Revised and expanded version in A15.

A14 "Sexuality: An Illustrated History" (New York: John Wiley, 1989; Moscow: International Center for Human Values, forthcoming; Tokyo: Seido Sha, 1997).

A14a Excerpted in Gendai Shiso (Tokyo) (June, 1992).

A15 "Inscribing the Other" (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

A16 "The Jew’s Body" (New York: Routledge, 1991; Tokyo: Seido Sha, 1997; Rome: Il corpo edizioni, forthcoming.). (Selected as one of the ten best academic books of 1992 by Choice magazine.)

A16a Excerpted in Marjorie B. Garber and Nancy J Vickers, eds., The Medusa Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 261-2.

A17 "Rasse, Sexualität, Seuche: Stereotype aus der Innenwelt der westlichen Kultur" (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992).

A18 "The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; paperback, 1994).

A19 "The Visibility of the Jew in the Diaspora: Body Imagery and Its Cultural Context". The B.G. Rudolph Lecture for 1992 (Program in Jewish Studies: Syracuse University, 1992).

A19a: Reprinted in Alan Berger, ed., Judaism in the Modern World (New York: NYU Press, 1994), pp. 87-124.

A20 "Freud, Race, and Gender" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Jewish Book Club, 1993; Psychology Book Club, 1993; Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1994; São Paulo: Imago Editora, 1995; Tokyo: Seido Sha, 1997; Milan: Il Saggiatore, forthcoming; Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1997) (Austrian Studies Association Prize for the Best Book in Austrian Studies for 1995).

A21 "Hysteria: A New History" (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993) (with Helen King, Roy Porter, George Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter)

A22 "L’Autre et le Moi: Stéréotypes occidentaux de la race, de la sexualité et de la maladie" (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996).

A23 "Jews in Today’s German Culture" • The Schwartz Lectures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

A23a "Jews in Today’s German Culture" [sound recording] . (New York, N.Y.: Jewish Braille Institute of America, 1995), 4 sound cassettes: analog, 3 3/4 ips, 2 track.

A24 "Health and Illness: Images of Difference" (London: Reaktion Books, 1995; Tokyo: Arina Shobo, 1997; Madrid: Escuela Libre de Derecho y Economia, forthcoming).

A24a "Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Difference" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

A25 "Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient" (New York: Routledge, 1995).

A26 "Smart Jews: The Construction of the Idea of Jewish Superior Intelligence at the Other End of the Bell Curve" (The Inaugural Abraham Lincoln Lectures) (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1996; paperback edition, 1997; München: Claasen, 1998; Tokyo: Sankosha, 2000).

A26a [sound recording] . (New York, N.Y.: Jewish Braille Institute of America, 1998).

A27 "Love + Marriage = Death and Other Essays Representing Difference" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

A28 "Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery" (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) (Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book of 1998, Gustavus Meyer Center).

A29 "Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery" (Princeton: Princeton University Press; Doubleday Select Bookclubs, 1999; paperback edition, 2000; Korean translation: Yeesaw Publishing Co. [forthcoming] ).

A29a Extracted in: Looking Good (The Nose No. 5) (New York:Pushpin, 2001)

A29b Extracted in Arthur Caplan, James McCarthy, Dominic Sisti, eds., Health, Disease, and Illness (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2004), pp. 221-4.

A30 "How I Became a German: Jurek Becker’s Life in Five Worlds." Occasional Paper No. 23 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1999).

A30a Reprinted in Alo Allkemper and Nortbert Otto Eke, eds., Literatur Und Demokratie: Festschrift für Hartmut Steinecke zum 60. Geburtstag (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2000), pp. 245-72.

A31 "The Fortunes of the Humanities: Teaching the Humanities in the New Millennium" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

A32 "Jurek Becker and Cultural Resistance in the German Democratic Republic". The Inaugural Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture (Boston: Boston College, 2001).

A33 "Jurek Becker: Die Biographie" (Berlin: Ullstein, 2002; paperback, 2004).

A34 "Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities" (New York: Palgrave / Macmillan, 2003; paperback, 2004).

A35 "Jurek Becker • A Life in Five Worlds" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) (a version of the biography for the Anglophone world).

A36 "Fat Boys: A Slim Book" (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

A37 "Kann die jüdische Diasporaerfahrung als Modell für die heutige Muslimische Diaspora in Europa dienen?" (München: Lehrstuhl für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur, 2004).

A38 "Franz Kafka" (London: Reaktion Press, 2005).

A39 "Multiculturalism and the Jews" (New York: Routledge, 2006).

A40 "Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity" (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

Editions

*Johannes Agricola, Die Sprichwörtersammlungen: Eine historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971), two volumes.
*NS-Literaturtheorie: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenaeum, 1971).
*The City and Sense of Community: A Symposium (Center for Urban Development Research, Cornell, 1976).

Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger, Werke. Co-editor of the twenty-one-volume edition and editor of ten of Klinger’s novels and his philosophical writings. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1978ff).

B4 Vol. 11: "Fausts Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt" (1978). B5 Vol. 18: "Der Weltmann und der Dichter" (1985). (with Thomas Salumets) B6 Vol. 12: "Giafar der Barmeciden" (2004). (with Thomas Salumets and Karl-Heinz Hartmann) B7 Vol. 13: "Raphael" (1990).B8 Vol 16: "Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten Zeit" (2007). (with Karl-Heinz Hartmann and Thomas Salumets)

B9 Robert Blum: Aus dem literarischen Nachlass (and a reprint series of 5 volumes of Blum’s writings) (Nendeln: Kraus, 1979).

B10 Begegnungen mit Nietzsche (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981; second revised edition, 1985; third edition, 1987).

B11 Introducing Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1982).

B12 J. P. Eckermann: Aphorismen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1984).

B13 Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). (with J. E. Chamberlin)

B14 Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of his Contemporaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; paperback edition, 1991). (translated by David Parent) (Selected as one of the ten best academic books of 1988 by Choice magazine.)

B15 Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language: With the Full Text of His Lectures on Rhetoric Published for the First Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). (with Carole Blair and David Parent)

B16 “Zettelwirtschaft”: Briefe Friedrich Gundolfs und Hermann Brochs an Gertrude von Eckardt-Lederer. Mit Briefen von Elisabeth Gundolf, Bertold Vallentin und Joachim Ringelnatz (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1992)

B17 Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis (New York: New York University Press, 1991; paperback edition, 1993) (with Steven T. Katz)

B18 Heine and the Occident (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) (with Peter U. Hohendahl)

B19 Reading Freud’s Reading (New York: New York University Press, 1993; paperback edition, 1994) (with Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller, Valerie Greenberg).

B20 Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature Since 1989 (New York: New York University Press, 1994) (with Karen Remmler)

B21 Freud (The German Library) (New York: Continuum, 1995).

B22 Special Issue on “Germanité, judaïté, altérité,” Revue Germanique Internationale 5 (1996).

B23 Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1006- 1996 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1997) (with Jack Zipes).

B24 Abgetrieben: Alexander Polzin (with texts by Sander L. Gilman, Thomas Brasch, Michael Hagner, Adolf Muschg, Doron Rabinovici, Moshe Zuckermann) (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997).

B25 Special Issue on “Ethnicity,” PMLA 113 (January, 1998).

B26 Special Issue on “New Illnesses—Old Problems; Old Illnesses—New Problems,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 22 (Winter, 1998).

B27 Special Issue on “Medicine and Culture,” Nineteenth Century Prose 25 (Spring, 1998).

B28 "Der schejne Jid: Das Bild des “jüdischen Körpers” in Mythos und Ritual" (Wien: Picus Verlag, 1998) (with Robert Jütte)

B29 "Jewries at the Frontier" (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999) (with Milton Shain).

B30 "Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte" (Cologne: Dumont, 2000) (with Claudia Schmölders).

B31 "A New Germany in the New Europe" (New York: Routledge, 2000) (with Todd Herzog).

B32 Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Die Generation nach der Shoah (Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 11) (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2002) (with Hartmut Steinecke).

B33 Special Issue on “The New Genetics and the Old Eugenics: The Ghost in the Machine,” Patterns of Prejudice 36 (2002).

B34 Special Issue on “Schönheit-Beauty,” Formationen 2 (2001).

B35 A Jew in the New Germany — Selected Writings of Henryk Broder (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2003) (with Lilian Friedberg).

B36 "Smoke: A Global History of Smoking" (London: Reaktion Press, 2004) (with Zhou Xun) (Korean translation, Seoul: Imago Publishing House, 2006).

B37 Special Issue on “Body and the Mind in the History of Psychiatry,” "History of Psychiatry" 17(1) (2006).

B38 Special Issue on “Race and Contemporary Medicine: Biological Facts and Fictions,” "Patterns of Prejudice" 40 (2006).

B38 "Race and Contemporary Medicine: Biological Facts and Fictions" (New York/London: Routledge, 2008).

B39 Special Issue on “Beyond Klezmer: The Legacy of Eastern European Jewry Today,” "Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies" 25 (2006) (with Elizabeth Loentz).

B40 "Other Renaissances" (with Brenda Schildgen and Zhou Gang) (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006)).

B41 "Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia" (New York: Routledge, 2007)

Work in progress

*Co-editor (with Anson Rabinbach), The Nazi Sourcebook (under contract to the University of California Press)
*Geschlechtschirurgie: Kriegsverlust und sexuelle Identität (under contract to Suhrkamp)
*Editor, International Encyclopedia of the Cultural and Social History of Medicine (under contract to ABC-Clio)
*Editor, Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Jewish Culture (under contract to Routledge)
*Freud (A Biography for the 21st Century) (under contract with Reaktion Press)
*Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) (under contract to Indiana University Press)

References