Sandra Gilbert, a University of California, Davis, English professor, women's literature scholar and poet, has been named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the highest honors academics can attain. Described by scholars from across the country and around the world as one of the most powerful and influential literary critics writing in America today, Gilbert is among 151 new fellows and 14 foreign honorary members elected. More than 4,000 fellows and foreign members are associated with the academy, including 160 Nobel laureates and 64 Pulitzer Prize winners. Gilbert is among 17 UC faculty members to be elected to the academy at this time. She joins 10 previously elected UC Davis academy members. Election to the academy is based on distinguished contributions to science, scholarship, public affairs and the arts. Among those elected with Gilbert are former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, Supreme Court Justice David Souter, 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner in music Wynton Marsalis, and Michael Gazzaniga, former director of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, now at Dartmouth College. Gilbert is on sabbatical leave from the campus and is out of the country at this time. Gilbert is known as a prolific writer, poet and literary critic. Her 1979 book, "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination," co-authored with Professor Susan Gubar of Indiana University, is considered a key turning point in the field of women's studies in literature. Since that book, Gilbert and Gubar have collaborated on other works, including the three-volume "No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century," and "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women." Recently, Gilbert and Gubar co-authored an irreverent look at contemporary cultural and political correctness debates in "Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama." Gilbert has published more than five volumes of poetry, including "Ghost Volcano" and "Blood Pressure." She frequently publishes essays, either separately or in collaboration. In 1995, Gilbert wrote about her husband's unexpected death following surgery in "Wrongful Death -- A Medical Tragedy." In 1996, Gilbert was selected as faculty research lecturer, one of the campus Academic Senate's most prestigious honors. She served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1996; the group is the largest and most prestigious professional society for scholars of literature. She has received many awards during her career, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. She was a co-winner of the Ms. Magazine "Woman of the Year" award and she received the Eugene Tietjens Memorial Prize awarded by Poetry magazine. Gilbert received her bachelor's degree from Cornell University, her master's from New York University and her doctorate from Columbia University. She joined the UC Davis faculty in 1975, after having been an associate professor at Indiana University.