Dörte Bemme

Dörte Bemme is an anthropologist of psychiatry and global knowledge. She received her MA in European Ethnology and Modern German Literature from Humboldt University in Berlin, her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the Department for Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University (Montréal, Canada). She was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and the New School for Social Science Research (New York). Currently, she is an assistant professor at King’s College London in the Department for Global Health and Social Medicine, where she leads the Social Theory Platform of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. She hold three editorial positions, as managing editor at Transcultural Psychiatry, social theory editor at Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, and as editorial board member of the medical anthropology blogpost Somatosphere. At the MPIWG, she is a member of the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life, where she is working with Alfred Freeborn on a special issue on "The History and Legacy of the WHO Studies on Schizophrenia" which will be published in History of the Human Sciences in 2027. She is also finalizing her ethnographic monograph Contingent Universality, to be submitted to MIT Press in 2025.