Afia Ofori-Mensa (Dr. O), Ph.D.

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Afia Ofori-Mensa provides strategic leadership for the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access & Opportunity’s efforts to make postgraduate pathways in academia and higher education more equitable. Dr. Ofori-Mensa designs and directs life design and professional development programs for undergraduates and beyond. She is the Administrative Director of Princeton's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), a PhD pipeline initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that seeks to diversify the professoriate in the humanities and social sciences. She is also the founding director of Princeton’s Aspiring Scholars and Professionals (ASAP) program, an undergraduate research and professional internship program that pairs non-Princeton students with faculty and staff mentors at both Princeton and the students' home institutions. ASAP aims to introduce undergraduates to careers in higher education and fosters cross-institutional connections through collaborative student mentorship.

Her work focuses on managing strategic partnerships with colleges, universities, consortia, and higher education organizations to expand 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 advises undergraduates pursuing PhDs.

A Ghanaian American educator, storyteller, and performer, Afia grew up in Piscataway, New Jersey. She came to Princeton from Oberlin College, where she held roles as Assistant Professor, Director of Undergraduate Research, and Assistant Dean. She earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an MMUF recipient, and her MA and PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Her research explores gender, race, and national identity in 20th- and 21st-century US, with a focus on beauty pageantry. She has appeared in BuzzFeed, NPR, and the New York Times. If you spend time around Dr. O, you’re likely to hear her say, “Okay, tell me… everything.”

Contact Afia: afia@princeton.edu

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

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Dan-el, born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in Classics with a WWS certificate (2006; Latin Salutatory(Link is external)). He held the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship(Link is external) to read for the M.Phil. in Greek and Roman History at Oxford (2008), and a Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford (2014), supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship(Link is external). After a postdoctoral stint at Columbia’s Society of Fellows, he returned to Princeton, where he holds an appointment in Classics and is affiliated with the Program in Latino Studies (Link is external).

His research focuses on the Roman Republic and early Empire, using social-scientific methods and ancient evidence. His book Divine Institutions (in progress; PUP) examines how temple construction and pilgrimage networks unified the “imperial Republic.” He is also developing articles on Roman slaves, divination, and family names. Two pieces on Varro will be published soon, and his co-edited volume Empire of Plunder (CUP) is nearing completion. His work explores cultural exchange through new approaches to ancient evidence.

Peralta also studies classical reception in modern American and Latin American cultures. His essay on classical reception in Santo Domingo will appear in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, and he’s contributing to a volume on classical receptions in the Black Atlantic. He is working on new projects related to citizenship and waste management from antiquity to today.

A public scholarship advocate, Peralta sits on Eidolon's editorial board and has written on Greco-Roman receptions in hip-hop(Link is external) and a two(Link is external)-parter(Link is external) on immigration. His memoir, Undocumented(Link is external), was published in 2015. His work has since appeared in The Guardian(Link is external), Matter(Link is external), and Vox(Link is external), promoting classics in the pursuit of social justice.

Tirzah Anderson

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Tirzah is a second-year PhD student in History whose research focuses on kinship and the family in formerly enslaved Afro-Native communities in Indian Territory at the turn of the 20th century. She is pursuing graduate certificates in African American Studies and Digital Humanities. Community-based and digital humanities research practices are central to Tirzah’s project. She graduated in 2021 with a BA in History from Barnard College where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Kierra Duncan

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Kierra Duncan (she/her) is a rising fourth year Ph.D. student in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). Her concerns rest at the intersection of literary and archival studies, history, and anthropology. Her dissertation explores how Afro-Jamaicans and Afro-Americans across the nineteenth century conceptualized freedom using ephemeral forms of folk expression. Before beginning at Princeton, Kierra earned a B.A. in English from UCLA, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Runnie Exuma

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Runnie is a second year doctoral student in the Anthropology department at Princeton. She is a researcher, writer, performance artist, and filmmaker interested in the poetics and corporeal politics of both Mediterranean and Caribbean spaces. Prior to joining Princeton, Runnie completed a dual degree between the Paris Institute for Political Studies and Columbia University, where she studied languages and comparative literature. She is a very proud Brooklyn baby from a very Caribbean family.

Solome Haile

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Solome Haile (she/her) is a third-year graduate student in the sociology department. Prior to starting her graduate studies, Solome served as clergy to Black students, a research associate in the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research’s Landscapes of Structural Racism and Health Lab, and a research assistant in Washington University in St. Louis’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity. She completed her BA in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include social theory, critical carceral studies, legal studies, Black feminisms, and qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Moad Musbahi

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Moad Musbahi is a joint PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. His scholarship tracks the transnational circuits of migration and credit across the Sahara and how injury is (re)produced in this arena, with a focus on sound studies. Through multi-sited ethnographic and archival research in Libya, Algeria, and Mali, his dissertation project explores how claims of belonging, demands for land and other economic privileges are evidenced through pathologized understandings of the body and the voice. In addition, he has written on financial obligation, healthcare ethics, environmental & humanitarian development and sonic politics. Prior to Princeton, he worked in cultural and humanitarian spaces, notably as an aid worker with the Tunisian Red Crescent and the UNHCR, and supported research for Jerusalem Legal Aid Center and other advocacy initiatives. As an artist, he makes sound installations and sculpture, with work recently shown at La Casa Encendida, Madrid [2024], Kunstverein, Hamburg [2023] and the 14th Venice Biennale [2023]. Moad is a member of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) experimental sound ensemble. He holds a Masters in Architecture from the Architectural Association in London and a MA in Writing in Translation from the RCA, School of Arts and Humanities.

Aditi Rao

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Aditi Rao (she/hers) is a third-year graduate worker in Princeton University's Classics department. Aditi works on issues of linguistic contact and cultural recognition at the border between Greek and Sanskritic worlds in the 3rd century BC. The long tail of her research reaches into practices of colonial philology and early-modern South Asian intellectual history. Aditi completed her BA in Classics, Greek and Sanskrit, from Barnard College in 2021 where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow. Outside of the department, Aditi is a committed organizer for graduate student unionization efforts, for Israeli apartheid divestment campaigns, and for police abolition, which connect with her interests in critical university studies and university abolition studies.