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Lacy holds a BA in French from Truman State University and an MA in Art History from Washington University in Saint Louis (WashU) where she is currently pursuing her PhD. She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American Modern art. Her primary scholarly interest is the colonial histories of France and North Africa.

She is currently working on her dissertation which examines Franco-Algerian visual culture from the Interwar Period to Algerian Independence in 1962. The purpose of her dissertation is two-fold. The first objective is to identify the various ways that the French state used visual media to advance its colonial ambitions in Algeria, and thus to situate French colonial visual culture within the broader context of European modernism. The second objective is to reconstitute a history of Algerian resistance through the examination of both organized and spontaneous visual strategies, including extra-institutional methods of resistance used by demonstrators and rioters such as graffiti and homemade posters and flags.

Lacy is also interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning. She recently completed a graduate fellowship at the Writing Center at Washington University in Saint Louis where she  studied the collaborative potential between the writing center, professors, teaching assistants, and students. In her pedagogical research, Lacy also seeks to determine how writing center ideology can be integrated into a classroom setting to ensure student growth and success in their first year of undergraduate study.

Lacy’s other research interests include queer theory, feminist theory, Marxism, disability studies, and museum studies.