Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Sciences, is reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and Dr. Phil's The Ultimate Weight Solution.

A cultural, medical, and literary historian, Gilman studies a multitude of subjects: visual stereotypes of the mentally ill, the racial and ethnic implications of aesthetic plastic surgery, German Nazi culture, and the history of diets and dieting. That's just for starters.

Gilman's research comes together around a unifying question. "I'm interested in how we categorize," he says. Working across disciplines, he explores the attribution of meaning by social groups to different people, ethnicities, bodies, illnesses or diseases, and cultural phenomena. "What is it within a society or collective that needs to be satisfied by the creation of stereotypes?" he asks.

Since joining the Emory faculty in 2005, Gilman has engaged his students in interdisciplinary and applied humanities scholarship. He has created a new focus in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA), where he collaborates with graduate and undergraduate students on projects such as the history of dieting. Findings are presented in ways that appeal to a broad audience. Such projects make explicit what Gilman says humanist scholars have been doing for generations: creating knowledge in community. "No one really works in isolation," he says. "Not even Kant." Gilman hopes the ILA will become a national leader in applied humanities research training for undergraduate and graduate students.

Gilman's teaching interests also extend beyond the traditional humanities to include the history of psychiatry and the history of medicine. He has taken over the directorship of Emory's Psychoanalytic Studies Program (PSP) and is working with affiliated faculty to create a new structure for the training of psychotherapists and new degree programs in psychoanalysis. Last year, the American Association of Facial Plastic surgeons awarded Gilman the Conley Medal for writing on plastic surgery as a cultural practice. Some would call him an intellectual connoisseur, a polymath, even a Renaissance man. Gilman prefers another description. "My goal in life is to resuscitate a very acceptable eighteenth-century concept: the dilettante," he says.

His current work on the history of diets and dieting has him wielding Mitchell in one hand and Dr. Phil in the other. It marks a follow-up to Gilman's Fat Boys (2004), a history of male obesity. "Dieting is an age-old obsession," Gilman says. His chapter on regional differences includes an analysis of Scarlett O'Hara's Irish father, whom Mitchell praises as "stout" in Gone With the Wind. His chapter on diet trends shows how Dr. Phil links weight loss to self-improvement. Most of all, Gilman challenges the claim that the United States is suffering from an "obesity epidemic." The hysteria surrounding this so-called epidemic serves a cultural function, he argues.

Gilman does not deny that Americans have seen an increase in average weight over time. Instead, he explores the cultural meanings that become assigned to this increase. The idea of an 'epidemic,' he argues, resuscitates two older stereotypes about persons who are overweight:

"Obesity as a medical problem. Today, doctors talk about obesity as a chronic disease or a genetic abnormality, even though no one has found an 'obesity gene' in humans. The medicalization of weight revives an early twentieth-century argument that saw fatness as a thyroid problem. "Back then, scientists had just discovered hormones," Gilman explains, "so they suggested obesity was the result of an endocrine problem." Medical diagnoses of overweight people often reveal more about current trends in research than they do about obesity.

"Obesity as a behavioral or psychological problem. Many people view obesity as a lifestyle imbalance to be corrected through self-improvement. This behavioral approach revives an early twentieth-century argument that saw fatness as a psychological problem. "This was the psychoanalytic view that fat people eat to compensate for a mother who did not love them," Gilman explains. Like the earlier psychological approach, the behavioral analysis of obesity centers on self-improvement, self-image, and lifestyle changes. Both descriptions remain rife with moralistic innuendos.

Gilman concludes that the medical and behavioral descriptions of obesity share a common trait. Both pathologize the state of being overweight. He rejects this trend: "I'm trying to depathologize weight." Placing America's current dieting obsessions into historical context will educate policy makers and public health advocates. "We need to pay more attention to the cultural and historical dimensions of health," Gilman says. He also hopes to remind policy makers that eating disorders continue to flourish across racial and ethnic divides. Amidst all the panic about Americans being too fat, "we've forgotten about anorexia," he says. Gilman sees intriguing correlations between our obsession with obesity today and the fascination with anorexia in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in relation to women, patriarchal society, and the manipulation of self-image.

This summer, Gilman will travel to Shanghai to read medical journals in preparation for a book on cultural attitudes toward new diseases. He will explore the transference of older stereotypes onto new health problems - looking, for example, at how the stigma attached to nineteenth-century syphilis became identified with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. China has piqued Gilman's curiosity because until very recently, its medical and policy literature remained inaccessible to outsiders. "China is still a culture in transition," he says. Gilman is learning Chinese in preparation for the trip. He says he doesn't mind the extra work so long as it helps him ask the right questions.

"What's interesting to me is how cultures select a problem that they think is vital at the moment, and then how that problem becomes an obsession," Gilman says. "I want to know what motivates the obsession."