Viktoria Räuchle
Senior Fellow 2025–2026

Viktoria Räuchle is a trained classical archaeologist with a strong focus on visual culture and the history of emotions. Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, bridging classical archaeology with perspectives from classical philology, art history, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and cognitive science. She is particularly interested in fundamental anthropological questions—such as birth and death, love and hate, and the cultural dynamics of violence—which she explores through ancient visual and textual sources.

She completed her PhD on concepts of motherhood in classical Athens within the interdisciplinary Excellence Cluster Languages of Emotion at Freie Universität Berlin. Most recently, she has completed her second book, Chain My Heart! Bound Eros in Graeco-Roman Literature and Art, submitted as her habilitation. The study contributes to the history of desire in antiquity and advances the still underexplored methodology of visual (emotional) metaphor in ancient culture.