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 working on two new projects: "Thinking About Sexuality with Novels" and "Novels and Language-in-Use." 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.
