Educational Bio

Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa serves as the Director of Equitable Postgraduate Academic Opportunity in the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access & Opportunity, and a Lecturer in Humanistic Studies, at Princeton University. In her role, she designs and directs programming that supports undergraduates at Princeton and other institutions – especially first-generation college students and low-income students – in pursuing future careers in higher education.

She earned her PhD and MA in American Culture from the University of Michigan, where her doctoral research examined relationships among race, gender, and national identity in U.S. beauty pageantry. She is also a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her BA summa cum laude with distinction in English, with a concentration in African American Literature and Culture. Dr. Ofori-Mensa has been a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow (MMUF).

She counts among her greatest educational influences Dr. Herman Beavers (Julie Beren Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania) and the late Oni Faida Lampley (her college performing art writing instructor), Tom Cotner (her high-school calculus teacher), and Elaine Bain (her middle-school English teacher), alongside all of her early childhood educators at the Rutgers-Livingston Daycare Center, which remains, to this day, the finest educational institution she ever attended.