Professor Blake specializes in gender and sexuality studies, food studies, and global modernist literature. Her research focuses on the ways queer pleasure is represented in the literature of the early twentieth century, and how those representations come to reshape existing literary forms. Her first book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, demonstrates that scenes of eating in modernist literature are sites of queerness, depicting and enacting a kind of pleasure that exceeds normative models. She is also interested in the relationship between modernism and popular forms of cultural production, including cookbooks, dinner theatre, genre fiction, and women’s middlebrow fiction. Her second book project, tentatively entitled Against the Love Plot, traces the ways mid-twentieth century women’s fiction resists both normative models of love and normative plotlines that end in marriage.
Professor Blake’s courses include: Queer Modernisms; Modernist Literature; Reading Voraciously: Food and Literature in the 20th Century; Virginia Woolf; Queer Literature; British Literature II; and Writing the Thesis.