Mata Seck

Seck specializes in the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. Her research and teaching span various disciplinary and linguistic traditions, with a particular focus on history, popular culture, and politics in the French-speaking world. She holds a Ph.D. in French, with a minor in anthropology and a certificate in African Studies from Stanford University, as well as an M.A. from the University of Georgia and Université Jean Moulin Lyon III. Before coming to Stanford, Seck was as an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island (CUNY/CSI).
Her book manuscript, Materializing Imaginaries in Postcolonial Senegal, offers a cultural history of the Senegalese left and examines its influence on African literature, cinema, and intellectual history. It investigates how these elements have shaped political, cultural, and urban imaginaries in Senegal and beyond. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Small Axe a Caribbean Journal of Criticism, World Literature Today, Etudes Littéraires Africaines, and Le Monde Afrique, among others.
In addition to courses about the French-speaking world offered at the Division of Literature Cultures and Languages (DLCL), Seck offers courses about African revolutions and the African diaspora in Europe and the Americas at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) and the Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS)