Wolfgang de Melo

Professor Wolfgang de Melo is a University Lecturer in Classical Philology at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics and the Philology department. His research focuses on Latin linguistics, encompassing phonology, metre, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. He teaches courses on Latin and Greek philology, Indo-European linguistics, and morphosyntactic typology. Currently on research leave until MT 2026, supported by the Leverhulme Trust (Major Research Fellowship MRF-2022-031), he is authoring a book on syntactic problems in Plautus and Terence.

His scholarly works include seminal publications such as The Early Latin Verb System (OUP 2007), a five-volume edition of Plautus: Comedies (HUP 2011-13), a two-volume commentary on Varro's De Lingua Latina (OUP 2019), and the textbook Latin Linguistics: An Introduction (De Gruyter 2024).

• Research affiliations: Clarendon Institute, Philology Department
• Key areas of expertise: Classical Latin grammar, Roman comedy linguistics, and Indo-European language comparison

His Leverhulme Fellowship supports ongoing research into early Latin syntactic structures. While on leave, he is only accepting doctoral students working on early Latin studies.