A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he has held Northwestern's Pearce Miller Research Professorship and is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Feinberg School of Medicine.
Previously, he taught at Emory University, where he was director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program in the Psychiatry Department.
A Victorianist by training, Lane specializes in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history.
Lane is the author of six books and the editor of two essay collections: His book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness critiques the broadness of the concept of social phobia as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
[1] Drawing heavily on unpublished papers at the American Psychiatric Association that document the creation and revision of the manual's third and fourth editions, Shyness also criticized the definitions of other mental disorders, including in a Los Angeles Times article that covered the controversies surrounding the drafting of the DSM-V.[2] In Slate, he discussed some of the disputes over the direction of the DSM and the secrecy surrounding the revision of its fifth edition.