Amalia Dache, PhD 

An Afro-Cuban American scholar, Amalia Dache is an assistant professor in the Higher Education Division at the University of Pennsylvania. Her experiences as a Cuban refugee and student traversing U.S. educational systems—among them urban K–12 schools, community college, state college, and a private research-intensive university—inform her research and professional activities. 

Dr. Dache’s major research areas are postcolonial geographic contexts of higher education, Afro-Latina/o/x studies, community and student resistance, and the college-access experiences of African diasporic students and communities. She is lead editor of Rise Up! Activism as Education, published in 2019 by Michigan State University Press. Her most recent article, “Ferguson’s Black radical imagination and the scyborgs of community–student resistance,” appeared in The Review of Higher Education in 2019. 

Dr. Dache was named a 2020 NAEd/Spencer Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow for her project, “Mapping Public Housing and Urban Higher Education Accessibility and Enrollment in Philadelphia.” In 2019, she completed Rockefeller Institute’s Richard P. Nathan Public Policy Fellowship where she conducted research on racial, transit, and economic factors inhibiting access to local postsecondary education in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate, New York. She received the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s (ASHE) Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year award in 2014.