Dissertation Title:
The Death of Jane McCrea: Sovereignty and Violence in the Northeastern Borderlands of the American Revolution

Blake studies intercultural brokerage, captivity, war, and race in North America and the Atlantic World. She is especially interested in the role of violence in relationships between Indigenous people and colonists in the eighteenth-century Northeast (currently New England and Quebec) and its continuing implication for the political landscape of the Northeast today. 

Blake’s dissertation, tentatively titled, “The Death of Jane McCrea: Sovereignty and Revolutionary Violence in the Northeast,” examines the much-publicized death of a single white American colonist during the early years of the American Revolutionary War, its connections to the century of warfare that preceded it and its place within debates about legitimate violence and statehood. 

Her dissertation has received support from the Princeton History Department and the Fund for Canadian Studies, as well as the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute-Fort Ticonderoga, and the Winterthur Museum and Library. Her article, “Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Mis Mac Rea: A Story of the American Revolution in the French Atlantic,” is forthcoming in the October 2022 issue of the William & Mary Quarterly.