Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Viktoria Räuchle
2025-2026
Home institution
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Country of origin (home institution)
Germany
Discipline(s)
Ancient history; Archeology and prehistory; Arts and arts studies; Literature
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies; Visual Arts
Fellowship dates
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Biography
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.
Research Project
Between Pathos and Distance: Ironic Attitudes Towards Emotion in Ancient Art
Within her fellow project, Viktoria Räuchle investigates irony as both an aesthetic device and an emotional strategy in Hellenistic visual culture. While Hellenistic art is widely recognized for its emotional intensity and its diverse repertoire of expressive techniques, the phenomenon of ironic distancing—both as a formal device and cultural practice—has received little scholarly attention.
The project seeks to develop a methodological framework for identifying and interpreting ironic elements or modes in ancient visual media. Focusing on representations of death, aging, illness, and desire, it examines how irony interacts with pathos to generate layered emotional responses and narrative complexity.
The Hellenistic period, with its rich interplay between visual art and literature and its heightened interest in affect, offers a particularly fertile context for this inquiry. Rather than functioning merely as a rhetorical ornament, irony emerges as a culturally embedded form of affective communication—one that enables emotional distancing, playful deflection, or subtle critique.
Research Interests:
Hellenistic art; classical archaeology; irony; aesthetic theory; visual culture; ancient art; emotion and affect; pathos; death and dying; aging; desire; art history; ancient literature.