Blumenthal received her Ph.D. in Medieval European history from the University of Toronto in 2000. She received her bachelor's degree in history from Columbia University in 1991. In 2000, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Cultures at Rice University. Prior to her appointment as an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, she was an assistant professor in the History Department of the University of Kansas. Her research interests center around late medieval Iberian history, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish interaction in the medieval Mediterranean world, and comparative slavery. Her publications include Las Casa dels Negres: Black African Solidarity in Late-Medieval Valencia. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds. K.P. Lowe and Thomas Earle (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and “Defending their Masters’ Honour: Slaves as Violent Offenders in Fifteenth-Century Valencia”, A Great Effusion of Blood?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, eds. Mark Meyerson, Oren Falk, and Daniel Thierry (University of Toronto Press, 2004).