Ariane Viktoria Fichtl studied Classics, Archeology and Modern History at the University of Augsburg (Germany) and Kwansei Gakuin University (Japan). She graduated in 2013 with a Master’s thesis that compared the Ancient Greek and Roman oratorical strategies of legitimating power in the second century AD.
In 2018, Ariane completed her binational Ph.D. in the History of Ideas at the Université de Lille (France), in cotutelle with the University of Augsburg (Germany). Her thesis was published by Classiques Garnier (Paris) in January 2021 carrying the title La Radicalisation de l’idéal républicain. Modèles antiques et la Révolution française.
From 2014 to 2018, Ariane was an early career fellow at the Institute Historique Allemand in Paris, as well as with Campus France and l’UFA (Université franco-allemande).
In 2019 Ariane won the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies’ Committee Award for presenting a research project on the reception of the Japanese shoguns’ seclusion policy in eighteenth-century Europe that was pioneering a new area of eighteenth-century studies.
From April 2020 to June 2021, Ariane was a visiting fellow at the Institute for European Cultural Studies at Augsburg, and a short-term visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.
Ariane’s main area of research is the reception of classical republican ideas and culture in eighteenth-century France and the evolution of a more modern republican language in Enlightenment Europe and America, with a focus on the global reception of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789) in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Her interests include the history of political thought, the history of transatlantic and global exchanges, and democratic republicanism.
In September 2021 Ariane started her project The Rights of Man in a Transatlantic Republic. French Migrants and the Birth of the Democratic-Republican Party in the United States as part of the Fondazione 1563’s Turin Humanities Programme project Enlightenment legacy: the rights of man in a global perspective (2021-2023) with Professor Vincenzo Ferrone (Turin University).
