Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Corinne Blake.  She was born and raised in Maine.  When she was fifteen, she moved with her mother and her two sisters to Palo Alto, California.  She graduated from Cubberly High School and then studied history at the University of California at Berkeley.  After two years at Berkeley, she wanted to study abroad but couldn’t afford it, so she took a year off to work, then traveled to Europe and to Israel.  Her interest in the Middle East began at this time.  She returned to Berkeley, took courses in Middle Eastern history and languages, and graduated in 1980.  At this point, she thought she might want to become a lawyer but gave up on that idea after a year of working at a law office.  In 1981, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Israel.  The next year, she received a Rotary Foundation scholarship to study in Jordan.  After these two years abroad, she returned to pursue a doctorate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.  Before starting at Princeton, she had studied Hebrew and Arabic, but she now became very interested in the Ottoman Empire. Since she was interested in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, she naturally had to learn Turkish during graduate school.  She became fascinated by how the Ottoman Empire was more complex and multi-cultural than she had thought previously.  She ended up studying Arab graduates of the most prestigious university in the late Ottoman Empire, conducting dissertation research in Turkey and Syria. After being hired by Rowan in 1992 and serving for a quarter century in the Department of History, she became Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018.  During her time at Rowan, she was particularly noted for her service to the Department and the University.  She won the Gary J. Hunter Excellence in Mentoring Award, Faculty Advisor of the Year for Sigma Iota Rho (Honor Society for International Studies), and was nominated to Rowan’s Wall of Fame for Advising several times. She is now Senior Associate Dean.

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I defended my dissertation in fall 1990, and my first child was born in December of 1990.  I taught a course on Islam at Rutgers University in New Brunswick for a year. I applied to the very small number of jobs in the Middle Eastern history, and I was offered the position at Glassboro State College, which was relatively close to where we were living.  I began in the Fall of 1992. I taught world history surveys and began proposing, and thereby expanding, the course offerings in Middle Eastern history. 

The history faculty set the tone for the Department and made it a warm and collegial place.  The chair, Richard Porterfield, helped me adjust my schedule the first semester, which was very important as at that time, I could not easily teach at night.  He made the Department a welcoming place. Robert Hewsen was also an important mentor.  He checked in with me to see how I was doing, while also leaving me alone to teach how I wanted.  It was great to see how Gary Hunter interacted with students.  Lee Kress was very helpful to me when I took over advising Phi Alpha Theta.  I have some great memories of working with Joanne McKinley.  We hosted the Eastern Regional conference for Phi Alpha Theta. 

In the middle of the 1990s, I became the coordinator for the International Studies Concentration.  As a person who had only been able to travel and study in foreign countries due to receiving scholarships, I was very interested in helping Rowan students with similar interests to be able to afford to do so. David Applebaum was the study abroad advisor when I began.  I supported his efforts but also wanted to help students travel after they graduated. In 1999, I became Rowan’s campus advisor for the Fulbright Scholarship program. No Rowan student, to my knowledge, had ever won a Fulbright Scholarship before I became the advisor. During my two decades as advisor, we had 25 students, from all over the University, win scholarships. They travelled to a wide range of countries, including Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Malaysia, Mongolia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, and more. In addition to the Fulbright program, I began advertising and promoting other scholarship opportunities for student travel and language study, including the Boren Scholarship program.  The website I created with information about different programs to study and work abroad (https://chss.rowan.edu/centers/inter_majors/interdisciplinary_programs/internationalstudies/scholarships/) is still a good resource for Rowan students. 

I loved my time in the Department of History. It was a wonderful, supportive environment that inspired faculty to work closely with students while also encouraging faculty to maintain active and successful research agendas.  We had a series of very good chairs who provided leadership while still allowing great individual freedom in teaching and service.

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University. 

• Register for the Reunion on October 20^th:  rowan.edu/historyreunion2023.
• Link to Project 100 on the Web: https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/
• Link to Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/251485937221524. 
• Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions. Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.