Isabelle Ratié studied Western philosophy at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University (she holds a DEA in the history of Greek philosophy and anagrégationin philosophy) before turning to thestudyof Sanskrit sources at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and then at the École pratique des hautes études, where she obtained a DEA, a PhD and an HDR. She spent several research periods in India and at Oxford University, and from 2010 to 2014 worked as a research fellow at the University of Leipzig, then at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna).She became a professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2014 (chair of Sanskrit language and literature) and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2021, and was elected professor at the Collège de France in 2025.
Her research focuses on the history of Indian philosophy as a terrain of struggle and exchange between representatives of rival religious currents. She is particularly interested in the śivite and Buddhist philosophical systems, to which she has dedicated several works. Her work, which has an important philological dimension, includes the production of critical editions and the study of fragmentary works, and also deals with the material culture of Sanskrit manuscripts.
