Blake Lopez

Blake was raised in Crown Point, Indiana and attended Mount Carmel High School in Chicago. He earned an AB in Classics and Linguistics from Harvard College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors in his field and delivered the 2024 Latin Salutatory. With the support of the Arthur Deloraine Corey Fellowship, Blake continued onto an MSt in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where he studied Greek and Latin comparative philology and literary papyrology and graduated with distinction in 2025.

Blake is interested broadly in Latin and Greek historical linguistics and specifically in submitting the languages to rule-based generative historical phonology and phonetic reconstruction. In his theses “‘Tempus Fuget’?: The Phonetic Realization of the Latin Short ‘I’ and its Outcomes in Sardinian” (2024) and “The Status of Latin Final ‘-m’ in Literary and Subliterary Texts of the Roman Empire” (2025), Blake evaluates both imperial Latin epigraphy and the modern Romance languages in order to construct Latin phonological rules that account simultaneously for the synchronic orthographic variation of subliterary Latin texts (“Vulgar” Latin) as well as for the diachronic regional diversification of Latin into the Romance languages (Proto-Romance).

Outside of spending lots and lots of time thinking about Latin and Greek, Blake enjoys playing the guitar, indoor bouldering, and reading comic books.