Faculty Fellow Amalia Daché

Amalia Daché is an Afro-Cuban American scholar and associate professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her experiences as a 1980s Mariel boatlift refugee and student navigating U.S. inner-city schools, community college, state college, and a private research-intensive university contribute to her lines of inquiry. Dr. Daché’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, “Bus-Riding from Barrio to College: A Qualitative Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analysis,” appeared in The Journal of Higher Education in 2021. Dr. Daché engages in research within contested urban geographies, including Havana, Cuba; Cape Town, South Africa; and Ferguson, Missouri. She has won numerous awards and fellowships from the National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Association for the Study of Higher Education, and The Rockefeller Institute.

Dr. Dache has appeared as an expert in film and national media outlets, including Spike Lee’s documentary Two Fists Up, Red Table Talk: The Estefans, MSNBC’s The ReidOut with Joy Reid, American Voices with Alicia Menendez, José Díaz-Balart Reports, Slate’s A Word with Jason Johnson podcast, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, #SOSCuba podcast with Enrique Santos, Black News Tonight with Marc Lamont Hill, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Politico, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Al Día.