Michael Lucey

Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor, Comparative Literature and French
Email: 
mlucey@berkeley.edu
Office: 
4210 Dwinelle
Office Hours: 
Spring 2024: Tuesdays 2-3 in 4210 Dwinelle and Fridays 2-3 on Zoom. To sign up for office hours, go to: https://calendly.com/mlucey-mpy/officehours

Research Areas

Comparative Literature; Modern French Literature and Culture; Modern English and American Literature and Culture; The Novel; Literary and Cultural Criticism and Theory; Social Theory; Linguistic Anthropology; Sexuality Studies; Cultural Studies of Music.

Biography

Michael Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. He also teaches regularly about nineteenth and twentieth-century British and American literature and culture, the novel in particular. Other areas of interest include sexuality studies; social and literary theory; cultural studies of music.  Publications include: 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); Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford University Press, 1995).  His latest book, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, which discusses Proust alongside Balzac, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Sarraute, and Cusk, was published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2022. His current projects are "Thinking About Sexuality with Novels" and "Novels and Language-in-Use."

The Misfit of the Family has been translated into French as Les ratés de la famille (Fayard, 2008).  He also co-edited (with Tom McEnaney and Tristram Wolff) a special issue of Representations (Winter 2017) on “Language-in-Use and the Literary Artifact,” as well as a special issue of Paragraph  called "Approaching Proust in 2022."  (Ph.D., Princeton University)

Books