Research Bio

In his recent work, Michael Lucey has developed a methodology combining insights from a Bourdieu-inspired sociology of culture and from the field of linguistic anthropology with the aim of studying a variety of ways in which works of literature function socially, and also studying ways in which certain works of literature can be understood to serve in their own right as analytical instruments for different aspects of the social world. His current work is focused mostly on novels.

A nearly-completed book on “Thinking About Sexuality with Novels,” like his previous books Someone and Never Say I, takes sexuality—same-sex sexuality mostly—as a set of cultural forms, concepts, and categories with which literary texts engage in complex ways; this engagement offers a paradigmatic case for thinking about literature interactively, for thinking about how novels, coupled with readers, do cultural work. His newest project is called “Ear Training: Novels as Musical Sound Archives, from Baldwin to Diderot via Proust,” and explores how Proust, Baldwin, and other novelists listened to their worlds with richly attentive ears, how they heard different social projects, or processes, or forces, or energies within people’s voices or their music. 

Recent and forthcoming publications include:

What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 

Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

“Silverstein and Bourdieu: A Science of Literary Works in Use.” In Luke Fleming, Nicholas H. Harkness, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds., The Total Linguistic Fact. University of Toronto Press. Forthcoming.

Introduction to Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by Helen Constantine, Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, 2026.

“Sexuality, Indexicality, and Music in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head,” Representations 174 (Spring 2026): 53-82.

“Some Novelistic Versions of Sexuality Happening in Language.” In “How to See What Has Been Done with Words,” eds. Nan Da and Matt Hunter. A special issue of Textual Practice 40, no. 3 (2026): 334-56.

“Understanding ‘Understanding Music’ in Proust.” In “Fugitive Proust,” eds. Hannah Freed-Thall and Zakir Paul. A special issue of Textual Practice 38, no. 11 (2024): 1746-58.

“From Phonemes and Sonemes to Qualia, Aspects, and Collateral Observation.” American Book Review 45, no. 3 (2024): 61-65

“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.

“Sociological.” In “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani,” eds. Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco. A special issue of differences. Volume 34, no. 1 (2023): 244-51. 

“Speech.” In Anna Elsner and Tom Stern, eds., The Proustian Mind. Pp. 191-208. New York: 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.

 

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).

 

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