PhD Alum Colleen Lucey Returns to Campus

Thrify Businesswoman or exploiter extraordinaire? The madam in 19th-century Russia

Slavic Studies PhD alum (2016) Colleen Lucey returned to campus on Thursday, September 22 to give a CREECA talk drawn from her recent book Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2021). The book is a reworked and expanded version of her dissertation, Figures of Desires and Disgrace: Woman as Commodity in 19th-Century Russian Literature and Visual Culture, which was completed under the supervision of Professor (Emeritus) Alexander Dolinin.

In her talk, Dr. Lucey discussed how Russia’s writers and artists popularized images of madams and procuresses as manipulative and greedy figures who tricked and abused women in their charge. Portrayed as far more heinous than the men who frequently brothels, the madam looms in literature and fine art as a traffiker in human flesh who goes against God and nature in the pursuit of profit. Yet, as historians of imperial Russia have shown, the experience of brothel madams working under the state system of administrative supervision (nadzor) was more complex than reflected in print and visual culture. Dr. Lucey traced how the image of the madam evolved in 19th-century Russia and discussed why such figures evoked heated debate about the rights of women and the regulation of commercial sex.

Dr. Lucey is currently Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona, and she is also currently completing a two-year term as Vice-President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL).

For those who missed Dr. Lucey’s lecture, the audio recording is available as a podcast on the CREECA Soundcloud site.