Dr. Gabriele Alex, 2009-2011

Curriculum Vitae

Gabriele Alex is now Full Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Tübingen University.

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Gabriele Alex was a Research Fellow working on medical diversity in Tamil Nadu, South India. Since October 2010 she obtains a professorship at Tübingen University.

She obtained her Masters degree in Medical Anthropology and her PhD in Social Anthropology from Brunel University, West London. Before joining the Max Planck Institute, she was Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology while also serving as Director of the Master’s Program Health and Society in South Asia at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Dr. Alex’s research interests include medical anthropology, ethnicity, healing and identity, and youth and childhood, on which she has conducted research in India and Germany. She has taught at the Department of Tropical Hygiene and Public Health as well as at the South Asia Institute at Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tübingen, the Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University, the Department of Ethnology, Free University Berlin, the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and has worked as a full-time Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at Westfälische Wilhelms University of Münster. She was teaching Medical Anthropology in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Luzern.

She is co-editor of the online publication Health and Society in South Asia, and continues to hold an academic fellowship at the Institut Français de Pondichery, Tamil Nadu, India.


Research interests:

  • Medical Anthropology, specifically: Medical pluralism and identity; folk healing; Public Health and Medical Anthropology; body politics and society; the institutionalization of medical systems
  • Anthropology of Youth and Childhood, specifically: Relations between youths in plural societies; transnational childhoods; childhood and youth in the diaspora; childhood and youth rituals
  • Migration and Tamil Diaspora, specifically: indigenous concepts of integration, diaspora representations and experiences

Research projects:

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