Graduate Student Bios

Ariel is an advanced PhD candidate specializing in modern French and global history. Her dissertation, entitled “Politics Imprisoned: Political Prisoners and the Making of Democracy, Decolonization, and Human Rights in Postwar France, 1945-1975,” is a political and legal history of the making of the category of “political prisoner” in late-twentieth-century France. She reveals how state actors and prisoner-activists mobilized the multivalent political prisoner category to define what justice meant in the context of developments in postwar democratic reconstitution, decolonization, and international human rights movements. Ariel’s research is supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2024-2025) and the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2020-2021).