Research Areas

Professor 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 latest book, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, which includes discussions of Balzac, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Sarraute, and Cusk alongside Proust, was published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2022. He is currently finishing up a book called "Thinking about Sexuality with Novels."  His translation of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims was published in 2013, and his translation of Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy was published in 2017. His translation of Eribon's The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman will appear in Spring 2025.

Professor Lucey was also the founding director of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, which sponsors lectures, conferences, fellowships and workshops.

Biography

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Selected Publications

Preface to Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by Helen Constantine, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

“Understanding ‘Understanding Music’ in Proust.” Forthcoming in Textual Practice.

“From Phonemes and Sonemes to Qualia, Aspects, and Collateral Observation.” Forthcoming in American Book Review.

“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, no. 1-2 (2023-2024): 1-35.

“Introduction: Proust’s Modernist Sociology.” In “Approaching Proust in 2022.” A special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 45, no. 1 (March 2022).

“Speech.” In Anna Elsner and Tom Stern, eds., The Proustian Mind. New York: Routledge, 2023, pp. 191-208.

“How You Read Madame Bovary.” Representations 156 (Fall 2021): 27-54.

“‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with Bourdieu.”  In Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, eds., What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought. Pp. 219-35. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.

“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. 

“What You Might Hear When People Talk, or Proust as a Linguistic Anthropologist.” In Matt Phillips and Tomas Weber, eds., Parasites: Exploitation and Interference in French Thought and Culture. Pp. 113-46. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018.

“On Proust and Talking to Yourself.” Qui Parle 26, no. 2 (2017): 281-293.

“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.

“Proust’s Bifurs.” In Patrick McGuinness and Emily McLaughlin, eds., The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham. Pp. 145-156. Oxford: Legenda, 2017.

“Proust and Language-in-Use.”  Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48, no. 2 (2015): 261-279.

“The Contexts of Marguerite Duras’s Homophobia.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 341-379.

“Mystères de la chair.” In Gerard Bonal and Frédéric Maget, eds., Cahiers de l’Herne. Colette. Pp. 231-38. Paris: Editions de l’Herne. 2011.

“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.

“When? Where? What?” In Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, eds., After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory. Pp. 221-44. Durham: Duke University Press. 2011.

“Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person.” Representations 109 (Winter 2010): 95-121.