Afia Ofori-Mensa provides strategic leadership of the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access & Opportunity’s efforts to make postgraduate pathways in academia and higher education more equitable. In that capacity, Dr. Ofori-Mensa designs and directs professional development programs for undergraduates at Princeton University and beyond. She is the Administrative Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) at Princeton, a PhD pipeline initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aims to diversify the professoriate in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. She is also the creator and founding director of Princeton’s Aspiring Scholars and Professionals (ASAP) program, an undergraduate research and professional internship program that pairs non-Princeton students with Princeton faculty and staff mentors,. to introduce undergraduates to careers in higher education.
Dr. Ofori-Mensa’s work focuses on managing strategic partnerships with colleges, universities, consortia, and other organizations in higher education – as well as with various units at Princeton – to expand the range, and increase the visibility, of postgraduate resources for Princeton and non-Princeton undergraduates. She leads program development, curricular design, and student success for MMUF and ASAP; designs new Postgraduate Pathways initiatives; and provides advising and support for undergraduates who are interested in pursuing PhDs.
Dr. Ofori-Mensa is a Ghanaian American educator, storyteller, and performer who was the first in her family to be born in the United States. She calls Piscataway, New Jersey and Plymouth, Michigan home. Afia came to Princeton from Oberlin College, where she initially held two postdoctoral fellowships in Comparative American Studies and Africana Studies before going on to serve as Assistant Professor, Director of Undergraduate Research, and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. She earned her BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a recipient of MMUF. She earned her MA and PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, where she was a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Her research interests explore relationships among gender, race, and national identity in the 20th- and 21st-century US, with a focus on beauty pageantry. She has had media mentions and interviews on BuzzFeed, New Hampshire Public Radio, NPR, and in the New York Times. If you spend time around Dr. O, you’re likely to experience her tilting her head, looking right at you, smiling, and saying with genuine enthusiasm and curiosity, “Okay, tell me…everything.”