She is currently professor of Roman history at University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and Adjunct Professor of Classics and Law at the University of Southern California (USC).
[2][3] Moatti studied classics at the École normale supérieure de Sèvres in France, where she specialised in political thought and the crisis in culture that arose at the end of the Roman Republic and in the early Roman Empire, a period around the 2nd century BC to 1st century AD.
She is also a former member of the staff of the French Academy in Rome.
She has done research on the history of the discovery of ancient Rome and the "invention" of Roman archaeology in the late 1980s.
She is interested in the construction of the concept of Res publica, her book on this subject—Res publica : Histoire romaine de la chose publique—has been published in April 2018, by Fayard.