Dörte Bemme

Dörte Bemme 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 is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin as a member of the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life. Her work bridges medical anthropology, psychiatry, and global knowledge systems.

• MA in European Ethnology and Modern German Literature, Humboldt University Berlin
• PhD in Medical Anthropology, McGill University
• SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina and The New School

Bemme’s research focuses on the epistemic politics of global mental health, emphasizing contingent universals, cross-cultural psychiatry, and the interplay between knowledge production and policy implementation. Her recent work explores virtuous failure in global health interventions and the cultural adaptation of scientific frameworks.

Bemme’s publications analyze the governance of global mental health, including critiques of universalist assumptions and the role of epistemic failure in shaping interventions. Her scholarship engages with disciplines such as medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and cultural theory.

Notable Scientific Awards:

• SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship

She actively contributes to academic discourse as a managing editor of Transcultural Psychiatry, social theory editor for Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, and editorial board member of the medical anthropology blog Somatosphere. Her current projects include a special issue on the history of WHO schizophrenia studies and an ethnographic monograph, Contingent Universality, under contract with MIT Press.