Biography

Dr. Blake has been at Rowan since 1992, the year that Glassboro State College became Rowan College of New Jersey. As a member of the History Department, she created and taught a variety of courses about the Middle East including Islamic Civilizations, Ottoman History, Modern Middle East, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islamist Movements, and Women in Islam. She also taught the survey course, World History after 1500, the History Department’s two core courses, Historical Methods and Seminar in History, and several graduate courses on topics related to Middle Eastern history. Dr. Blake served as the advisement coordinator for the History Department from 2008 to 2016, earning several nominations to the Wall of Fame for Advising and the Gary J. Hunter Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2016.

As a faculty member at Rowan, Dr. Blake has served on a wide variety of departmental, college and university committees. She served as the Coordinator of International Studies several times, most recently from Fall 2014 to August 2017, overseeing the implementation of a new major in International Studies and the accelerated 4 + 1 Program: B.A. in International Studies and M.B.A. She has also been actively involved in developing curriculum at Rowan, writing or co-writing numerous course and program proposals for the History Department and International Studies and serving on the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) curriculum committee from 2012-2017. In addition, Dr. Blake has been the faculty advisor for student groups such as Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society, and Sigma Iota Rho, the honor society for international studies, earning that society’s “Faculty Advisor of the Year” award in 2017.

As Rowan’s Fulbright Program Advisor from 1999 to 2019, Dr. Blake worked to promote the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and mentored numerous Rowan students applying for Fulbright Scholarships. Since 2000, Rowan students have won Fulbright Scholarships to Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Kosovo, Malaysia, Mongolia, Uganda, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom (U.K. Fulbright Summer Institutes), and Vietnam. As Associate Dean of CHSS, she served as the Fulbright Program Advisor as well as Rowan’s campus representative for other national scholarships such as the Boren Scholarship (and Fellowship) and the Critical Language Scholarship until 2019.  Currently, Dr. Seran Schug is serving as Rowan's Director of National Scholarships. Rowan students who are interested in studying or working abroad, as undergraduates or after graduation, are encouraged to read about the wide variety of available programs at Rowan’s International Opportunities website and contact Dr. Schug.

Dr. Blake received her B.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1991. She is interested in late 19th century Arab-Ottoman history, and has studied and conducted research in Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and Syria.