Blake Wilson studied for a number of years with the great early-music expert Thomas Binkley, from whom he learned the joy of integrating musical performance and scholarship. After earning a Masters and Ph.D. in musicology from Indiana University, Wilson taught for five years at Colby College and Vanderbilt University, where he founded and directed the Collegium in addition to teaching courses in music history and theory. He joined the Dickinson faculty in 1993, and served as chair during 1999-2003.

As a musicologist, Wilson has published extensively on the musical culture of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, including a book,  Music and Merchants (Oxford, 1992), and articles in the New Grove Dictionary, Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, and the Rivista Italiana di Musicologia. He is the recipient of grants from the NEH, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Commission. He recently was awarded a year-long fellowship at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and is now recognized as one of the leading authorities on the music of Renaissance Italy. His frequent teaching and lecturing has taken him to Canada, Iceland, France, Italy, and most recently to Australia, where he was a visiting fellow in the history department at Monash University in Melbourne.

In October 2005, Wilson was invited to lecture at the National Gallery of Art in conjunction with a special exhibition of monumental sculpture from Orsanmichele (Florence). His article on recently discovered letters concerning Heinrich Isaac, the great Flemish composer recruited by Lorenzo de’ Medici to lead his musical chapel, appeared in the Journal of Musicology 23 (2006), and he has just completed a book on music and poetry in Florence,  Song Repertories of Renaissance Florence, to be published by Olschki, the leading academic publisher in Italy.