As of 2022, Sher is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Rutgers University. He was a Senior Warnock Fellow at Yale University for the 2016-17 academic year. He is the editor of the forthcoming tenth volume in the correspondence series of the Boswell Research Editions, containing Boswell's correspondence with his friend, Sir William Forbes.
Sher earned his master's degree in the history and philosophy of social science at the University of Chicago, which later led to a PhD in modern European cultural, social, and intellectual history. He joined the NJIT faculty in the 1980s and has since then published widely on the Enlightenment and received a number of distinctions.
He is the founding Executive Secretary of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, as well as the editor of its annual newsletter, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, and the general editor of its book series, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland.
Sher married fellow scholar Doris S. Holstein in 1977.