Fatima Seck is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work centers on Sub-Saharan African literature by women, with a particular focus on the domestic realm across literary and artistic traditions. She undertakes reparative work around the kitchen, reclaiming it as a space of intellectual and experiential learning, where sensorial knowledge is valued and transmitted. Her research highlights the kitchen as a locus of agency within Black communities, moving beyond narratives that frame it solely as a site of servitude. Ultimately, her work honors and calls attention to the many unnamed women whose labor in kitchen spaces has shaped, nourished, and made possible the artists and scholars we celebrate today.

She completed her M.A. in French and Francophone Studies at George Mason University, where her thesis explored mistranslations from English and French into Wolof and vice versa, examining how translation tensions such as slippages and interpretive gaps, shape our understanding of what makes World Literature truly “world” literature.