Alix Ricau studied Art History and Comparative Literature at Paris Nanterre University and Freie Universität Berlin. Her PhD project focuses on the representation of farm animals in 19th century French and German popular fiction and questions the cultural and literary roots of contemporary framings of nonhuman lives in a rural context. She has been a member of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and EXC 2020 from 2021 to 2025.

Former EXC 2020 doctoral research project: Farm Animals in French and German Media Literature. Genealogy of a European Imagination of Rurality (1848–1945) (2021–2025)