Research Bio
Michael Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-centuries. He also teaches about social, literary, and critical theory, sexuality studies, 19th- and 20th-century British literature and culture, and 20th-century American literature and culture. His most recent books are Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert and What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk. Working titles for his current projects are "Thinking about Sexuality with Novels," "Novels and Language in Use," and "Ear Training: The Life of Sound in Novels." He is also a translator.
Recent and forthcoming publications include:
"Translation and Polylanguaging: Sexuality and Novels from James Baldwin to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr." Comparative Literature 76, no. 4 (2024): 406-28.
"Conceptualizing Trajectories of Readability." Nineteenth-Century French Studies 52, nos. 1-2 (2023-2024): 1-35.
What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Duke University Press, 2006).
The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2003).
"Sociological." in "Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani," eds. Jacques Khalil and John Paul Ricco. A special issue of differences, vol 30, no. 1 (2023): 244-51.
"Speech." In Anna Elsner and Tom Stern, eds., The Proustian Mind. Pp. 191-208. Routledge, 2023.
"Introduction: Proust's Modernist Sociology." In "Approaching Proust in 2022." A special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 45, no. 1 (2022): 1-21.
"How You Read Madame Bovary." Representations 156 (Fall 2021): 27-54.
“Real-Time Literary Texts.” College English 82, no. 1 (2019): 41-54.
“Ami ou protégé: Balzac, Proust and the Variability of Friendship.” In The Art of Friendship in France, 1789-1914, a special issue of Romanic Review 110 (2019): 187-202.
“Introduction: Language-in-Use and Literary Fieldwork,” co-authored with Tom McEnaney. In “Language-in-Use and the Literary Artifact.” A special issue of Representations, no. 137 (Winter 2017): 1-22.
"A Literary Object's Contextual Life." In Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, eds., A Companion to Comparative Literature. Pp. 120-35. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011.
His translations include Didier Eribon, The Life, Old-Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (2025); Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy (2017); Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims (2013).
Professor Lucey was also the founding director of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, which sponsors lectures, conferences, fellowships and workshops.
Research Expertise and Interest
the novel, sexuality studies, comparative literature, French, French literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British literature and culture, social and literary theory, cultural studies of music, studies of language in use, linguistic anthropology, theories of practice, twentieth-century American literature