Michael Lucey
Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Chair of French

Professor Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the 19th- and 20th-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.

Publications include:
Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Duke University Press, 2006). This book traces the development of a variety of complicated strategies for saying ‘I’ within literary texts dealing with same-sex sexualities.

The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2003), discusses the complex place sexuality holds in the social world of the Balzacian novel, its relation to history, economics, law, and the family.


Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, and Writing (Oxford University Press, 1995)


Translator of Didier Eribon’s Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Duke University Press, 2004)

He is currently working on a sequel to Never Say I.

Professor Lucey was also the founding director of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, which sponsors lectures, conferences, fellowships and workshops. (website: http://cssc.berkeley.edu)