Blake Lopez

Blake was raised in Crown Point, Indiana and attended Mount Carmel High School in Chicago. He earned an AB in Classics and in 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 before graduating with distinction in 2025.

Blake is interested broadly in Greek and Latin historical linguistics, especially the internal and comparative reconstruction of Latin vocalism. He pursues this goal 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), where he postulates phonological rules that account synchronically for nonstandard Latin orthography (“Vulgar Latin”) as well as diachronically for the regional diversification of the Romance languages (“Proto-Romance”).

Outside of spending lots and lots of time thinking about vowels, Blake enjoys playing the guitar, weightlifting, and reading horror literature.