David Blake teaches courses at The College of New Jersey on 19th- and 20th- century U.S. literature and the relationship between politics and literature.
Blake’s most recent book is The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick (Oxford), a meditation on wounding, disability, and the representation of Islam in U.S. narratives of aggrievement. The book follows nearly four decades of teaching Melville’s works to a wide variety of students and readers.
Blake has written extensively on the history of fame for both scholarly and popular audiences. He is the author of Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (Yale) and the co-editor of Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present (Iowa). His book Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics (Oxford) won the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award for the year’s best book in Media & Cultural Studies.
Blake has served TCNJ as English Department Chair, Faculty Representative to the Board of Trustees, Interim Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Planning, and chair of the Strategy Working Group. He sits on the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
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