How did stories about the sex trade circulate across and beyond a multilingual borderland with a mobile population? What did these narratives do rather than represent? This lecture argues that the stories themselves were part of how the sex trade, migration, sexuality, and regulation were produced and negotiated.

The city of Lviv and eastern Galicia are at the center of an inquiry into the varied forms of sex-trade narratives at the turn of the twentieth century. Galicia's position as an imperial borderland facilitated the movement of people, commodities, information, and stories while also making mobility and sexuality objects of intensified surveillance. Applying methods from folklore studies allows us to treat narratives as mobile, adaptive forms that cross genres and spatial and social boundaries. This approach makes apparent the linkages among rumor, folk narrative, press accounts, police accounts, and literary representations. Drawing from this field of study and new materialist research, the lecture develops a concept of narrative agency to describe the capacity of stories, as they move across space and among narrators, audiences, media, and institutions, to shape how people interpret and respond to the contested issues of migration, prostitution, and policing.

Tracie L. Wilson holds a PhD and a master's degree in folklore and ethnography, and in Russian and Eastern European Studies, from Indiana University-Bloomington. She has held positions at the University of Illinois, Bryn Mawr College, Leipzig University, and the Rachel Carson Center, and currently teaches at the Technical University in Chemnitz. She is based in Leipzig. In addition to Narrating the Sex Trade (2026), her recent publications include Emotions of Contested Migrations: The Return of the Wolf across the Polish-German Border (2024) and One Haunted River: Histories and Specters of the Odra (2025).

Der Vortrag ist Teil der Vortragsreihe Prague Histories Forum, die gemeinsam von den Prager Außernstellen des DHI Warschau, des Collegium Carolinum und des GWZO Leipzig organisiert wird. In diesem Wintersemester 2026/27 widmen wir uns dem Thema „Gender & Queer in East Central Europe".

Alle Vorträge der Reihe finden Dienstags von 15:50–17:20 Uhr in der Kunstfakultät der Prager Karlsuniversität statt.

Venue: Špork Palace, Hybernská 3, Prague 1 | Room 303, attic floor

All of the “Prague Histories Forum” lectures will be accessible online via Zoom. Please register here:
https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/yq0DKEQFRjS4TW3N2dNDeA

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