Born in 1948 in Würzburg, Germany, Gumbrecht received his education in Paris, Munich, Regensburg, Salamanca, Pavia and Konstanz, receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz in 1971 where he was also an assistant professor from 1971 to 1974. He had appointments at the universities of Bochum, Siegen, and has been at Stanford since 1989.

Gumbrecht's main areas of research, teaching, and publishing are:

• European literatures of the Middle Ages and of the late 18th and 19th centuries;
• history and pragmatics of communication media;
• epistemology of everyday culture; and, more recently,
• the aesthetics of sports.

His publications are extensive and in many languages, through principally in German (in the first half of his career) and in English (since moving to the U.S. in 1989).

His principal books are "Making Sense in Life and Literature" (University of Minnesota Press, 1989) "In 1926" (Harvard, 1998) " The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship" (University of Illinois Press, 2003), "Production of Presence" (Harvard Press, 2003), "In Praise of Athletic Beauty" (Harvard Press, 2007).

Edited books include: (with K.L. Pfeiffer) Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), (with M. Brownlee) Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), (with David Palumbo-Liu) Streams of Cultural Capital (Stanford: Stanford Literature Review, Spring/Fall 1993; book version at Stanford University Press, 1997).(with F. Kittler/B. Siegert) Der Dichter als Kommandant. D'Annunzio erobert Fiume (Munich: Fink-Verlag, 1996), (with Ted Leland, Rick Schavone, Jeffrey Schnapp) The Athlete's Body (Stanford: Stanford Humanities Review 6.2, 1998), (with Michael Marrinan) Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).