Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Emily Blanck.  She was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but moved to New York City when she was five years old.  When she was twelve, she moved to New Mexico and graduated from Cibola High School outside of Albuquerque in 1989.  That Fall, she began studying at the University of Texas at Austin as a Classics major.  After taking George Wright’s United States to 1865 survey course, she became a history major and, later, added a second major in African American Studies.  During her first year, she met and began dating Bill Carrigan (the editor!).  They married one week after she graduated in 1993.  She and Bill moved to Atlanta, Georgia.  She had several jobs but eventually took a position as the undergraduate coordinator for the Psychology Department at Emory University.  During that time, she took three graduate courses in Anthropology and History at Emory.  She soon decided that she wanted to pursue a doctorate in colonial American history and to specialize in the history of slavery.  In the Fall of 1995, she entered the graduate program at the College of William and Mary where she completed, in 1997, a master’s thesis on African American women and the law in colonial New England.  She and Bill moved back to Atlanta in the Fall of 1997 when she entered the PhD program at Emory University.  She finished the first draft of her dissertation in the summer of 2002, just before her first daughter, Julia, was born.  She completed her dissertation and graduated in the Spring of 2004.  Her second daughter, Sara, was born that September.  By this time, she had already begun teaching at Rowan University on a part-time basis through the American Studies program.  After teaching part-time for several semesters, she was offered a visiting one-year position in American Studies and History.  When this position turned into a tenure-track line, she applied for it, naturally. In the end, she got an offer from both Farleigh Dickinson University and from Rowan.  She chose Rowan and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in the Spring of 2008. 

***** 

I remember my first class at Rowan, a section of Introduction to American Studies, very clearly.  My first semester of teaching at Rowan was the Fall of 2001.  My second class was September 12, 2001.  I knew that class session would be very important to students as we were all trying to process the attacks on the previous day.  We spent that class time writing our own memories and reactions to the previous day, creating historical documents but also taking the time to reflect and think about what had happened.  For many of us with connections to New York City, that was a hard period.  My own father worked in the World Trade Center but was late to work and was not injured. 

Dianne Ashton was a very important mentor to me.  She recruited me to teach as an adjunct professor.  Once I had done that successfully, she began pushing for an American Studies tenure-track line that would be shared with History.  I am pretty sure that she saw me as a potential future coordinator of American Studies.  She was the founder of the American Studies major and had been running the program for over a decade by the time that we met.  She saw me as having both the training and the skills necessary to keep the program running and take it to the next level.  While Dianne clearly had me in mind, she was only one member of the hiring committee that eventually was formed for the tenure-track position.  My experience in teaching American Studies courses was a real strength, but I knew the position would draw very qualified applicants.  I won’t say much more about that process, except to say that it was complicated one.  I was also interviewing for other jobs at the same time.  In fact, I received an offer from Farleigh Dickinson University, and they wanted me to decide before Rowan’s timeline would be complete.  Bill thought it was too risky to turn down FDU, but I really wanted to be at Rowan for various reasons.  So, I decided to inform FDU and hope that Rowan came through.  I was relieved when the offer did come. 

Dianne’s support for me both before and after I got the job was very important, as it got me to start really thinking about myself as a potential administrator.  Since my very first year as a tenure-track professor, I have been constantly working as the coordinator of one or more interdisciplinary programs.  In addition to American Studies, I was involved with Africana Studies as well.  Today, I am the Executive Director for the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.  In this role, I helped create multiple interdisciplinary graduate programs, including ones in Holocaust and Genocide Education and Diversity and Inclusion.

One more thing about Dianne is that she was also somewhat responsible for my current research focus.  She was working on a history of Hannukah, but she also had her Senior Seminar in American Studies focus on the history of holidays.  My teaching demonstration during my on-campus visit for the job application was in her class, and I ended up choosing to teach about the history of African American holidays.  This was something that I had very little experience with at the time.  I had done a tiny bit of work in my dissertation, but it was really not something that I had ever thought about deeply. That guest teaching demonstration, however, led to my fascination with the history of the holiday Juneteenth, a subject about which I am now writing a monograph. 

Dianne was not the only person outside of the History Department that has been important to my administrative growth.  Both the previous Dean of our College, Cindy Vitto, and the current Dean, Nawal Ammar, have been critical to my ongoing development and growth as an administrator. 

The Department of History is full of peer mentors.  It is a collegial place that I think does a wonderful job supporting not only new faculty but faculty at all stages of their career.  The Department assigns official mentors to new faculty, and I was fortunate to be Melissa Klapper’s mentee.  She was warm, helpful, and supportive.  I benefitted greatly from the works in progress seminars run, at first, by Jim Heinzen, and later by other members of the faculty.  I feel lucky that Chanelle Rose entered the same year as I did, and we have been able to help each other as we have grown at Rowan.  A few years ago, I was lucky to be assigned Stephen Hague’s mentor.  That relationship was, I hope, helpful to Stephen, but it was certainly a boon to me.  I feel like we have both really supported each other over the years, and it has been a great relationship.  In fact, I would say that he became my mentor even while I was continuing to give him advice about Rowan and other matters.

 I really appreciate the fact that the Department values teaching, and I love the fact that our classes are small.  I really like the fact that our program emphasizes building strong historians, and it has given me great pleasure to watch as students I was helping in my classes really develop into stronger writers and thinkers.  I have also really enjoyed those times when I was able to work with students outside of the classroom as my research assistants.  I will never forget having Tessa Knight join me on my research trip across New England, searching in archive after archive for the last few documents I needed to complete my first book.

Because I did so much administrative work and taught courses in American Studies as well as History, I didn’t get to teach history majors as much as I wanted.  One thing that I really valued because of this was working on the poster sessions that the Department started hosting about a decade ago.  The work of helping the students, always the best students in the Department, to transform their papers into posters was a wonderful way for me to get to interact with these students, and has become a highlight of the year for me these days. 

I love the wide range of students that we have in our classroom, and I think that our students are a blessing in this regard.  Rowan has become my community because we have smart and engaged colleagues that really care about each other.  That community has flourished because we have been lucky to have such supportive Deans.  In our little corner of the University, at least, I think that we have created a community that supports learning in a way that I think is a real model for other institutions.

*****

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.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/