Indravati Félicité

Candidate statement

Indravati Félicité (Ph.D., University of Paris-Sorbonne, 2012) is Maîtresse de conférences in early modern European and German History at the University of Paris. In that position she has been a member of various academic committees in France. She has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the DAAD and the German Historical Institute (Paris and Washington, D.C.). In 2016 she published the monograph “Négocier pour exister” in the series “Pariser Historische Studien” of the German Historical Institute Paris (De Gruyter-Oldenbourg). This book, also available in German (Böhlau, 2017), stresses the particular goals and practices of German diplomacy after 1648 in order to reevaluate the Holy Roman Empire beyond its traditional pessimistic depiction as a divided and, therefore, deficient state. She has published several articles in journals as well as chapters in collective volumes, mainly in France and Germany, and has been invited by various German institutions (universities, archives, historical associations) to present her research on the Empire as a global player from the bottom-up perspective of individual diplomats, small German states and networks. In her habilitation project she seeks to internationalize the history of the Holy Roman Empire by examining commercial relations, cross-cultural interactions, and the German involvement in contemporary debates on globalization and imperialism. She is currently editing a volume on diplomats (Classiques Garnier, 2020, manuscript under contract). She has regularly presented papers at the GSA for many years, and also has organized and commented panels, mostly on the topic of the international and diplomatic history of early modern and modern Germany. In 2019 she co-organized a GSA Roundtable on “The New Diplomatic History in the German Lands.”