Blake Wentworth is a Professor at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD from The University of Chicago in the History of Religions (2011) and a BA in Religion from Dartmouth. (1995).

Blake concentrates on Tamil literature, with particular attention given to its constitutive role in the premodern cultural and religious histories of South Asia.

He also explores the position of Sanskrit in these developments, in expressions both of confluence and of contestation.

Currrently, he is at work on a book that studies the genre of ulā, one of the most popular poetic models of the Tamil literary genre.

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In 2016, Blake was in the news when Southeast Asian Studies graduate student Kathleen Gutierrez and Erin Bennett reported him for sexual harassment. The university did not dismiss him.