Our Faculty

Dr. Kim Hopper is a medical anthropologist who also works as a research scientist at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, where he co-directs the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health. He is author of Reckoning with Homelessness (Cornell University Press, 2003), a stocktaking of two decades of research, advocacy, and theoretical work in that field, and co-editor of the forthcoming Recovery from Schizophrenia: An International Perspective (Psychosocial Press), a report from the WHO collaborative study on the long-term course and outcome of schizophrenia. He is also author of a critical review of practical quandaries in applied anthropological work. Since 1979, Dr. Hopper has done ethnographic and historical research on psychiatric care and on homelessness, chiefly in New York City. Active in homeless advocacy efforts since 1980, he served as president of the National Coalition for the Homeless from 1991-1993. His current research interests include the reconfiguration of public mental health, cross-cultural studies of psychotic disorder, community-based modalities of coercion, and dimensions of recovery and support in severe mental illness. Dr. Hopper is currently co-investigator on a number of NIMH-funded studies. He was co-convener of a Qualitative Methods Institute at NYU in the summer of 2002 and consults frequently on methodological issues in mental health services research. From 1999 to June 2003, he was a member of the NIMH Services Research Scientific Review Committee.

PhD, Columbia University, 1987

Additional Affiliations:

• Member, Amercian Anthropological Association
• Member, Society for Applied Anthropology

• Anthony Leeds Awards in Urban Anthropology, 2003
• Finalist, C. Wright Mills Award, SSSP, 2003
• Honorable Mention, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute, Book Award, 2003

Homelessness History + Present
For over two decades Dr. Hopper has been investigating the history, causes, and public response to homelessness, with particular emphasis on legal aspects and advocacy. He has written extensively on the demands of scholarship and the courts with respect to evidence and its interpretation in formulating public policy.

Mental Health and tPublic Policy
As Research Scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute, Dr. Hopper co-directs the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts, which has built a portfolio of CBPR-based research that is attempting to apply Amartya Sen's "capabilities" approach to the practice of public mental health.

Field School in Social Research Method
Hopper founded this experimental school for mental health peers -- people with long experience in the public mental health system -- to become conversant with research methods so as to be better able to read and critique the literature, participate in collaborative research efforts, and undertake their own inquiries.

WHO-Collaborative International Study of Schizophrenia
Dr. Hopper edited a final collection of reports (Oxford 2007) on this long-term follow-up study of treated incidence cohorts of clinically (PSE)-defined schizophrenia in 14 communities across 10 countries.


Adolescent Narratives of Resilience in Circumpolar Communities
As President's Professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Hopper consults on this narrative-based approach to adolescent passages in the Circumpolar North (NW and SW Alaska, Norway, Siberia, and Nunavit, Canada).