Dr Claudia Lang (C.V.)

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Health

Claudia Lang is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Health. She is an anthropologist with a focus on mental health, digitization, ecological distress, global health, planetary health, and traditional medicine, primarily in South Asia (particularly India), and drawing upon comparative ethnographic and transnational perspectives. Her research focuses on the intersection of mental health and social life, situating the lived experience and care of mental distress in wider social relations.

Claudia's research focuses on mental health, digitization, ecological distress, global health, planetary health, and traditional medicine, primarily in South Asia (particularly India), and drawing upon comparative ethnographic and transnational perspectives. Her research is at the intersection of mental health and social life, situating the lived experience and care of mental distress in wider social relations.

In one current research project, she focuses on digital mental health innovations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with designers and users of digital mental health care in India, she  explores the political, economic, and moral aspirations and worries associated with such digital tools; and the new forms of care, self-care, and intimacy they produce.

In another current research, she focuses on “environ-mental health” in India, using the lens of ecological grief. She  examines affective responses to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss, with a specific focus on India, looking at the experience, ethics, and politics of ecological grief amid wounded environments and grief’s generative potential for practices of repair.

Claudia is author of Depression in Kerala. Ayurveda and mental health care in the 21st century (Routledge, 2018) and a co-author of Global Health for All: Knowledge, Politics, and Practices (Rutgers, 2022), and of The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia” (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). 

Prior to joining University of Maastricht, Claudia was leader of a research project ‘Digital Mental Health in India’ at the University of Leipzig (2019-2024), which focused on digital mental health innovations in India. It examined chatbot- and platformed automated therapy, looking at aspirations and worries associated with such digital tools, and the new forms of care, human-technology relations, and intimacy they produce. She previously also carried out research on depression and Ayurveda in South India, and on ways of knowing and inhabiting intersexed bodies in Germany. Earlier, Claudia had academic positions in Leipzig, Boston, Paris, Munich and Münster.