Giovanni Bazzana

Profile

Giovanni Bazzana joined the Faculty of Divinity in July 2009. He previously served as a sessional instructor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Before teaching at Toronto, Bazzana was a fellow, from 2004 to 2007, at the University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano), where he also received an MA and taught courses on New Testament and early Christian literature. He received his PhD in religious studies from the International School of Sciences of Culture in Modena, Italy. In 2007-08, he was a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame. Bazzana's areas of research include the Gospels and papyrology, the New Testament in its social world, and the old Latin translation of the Bible. His chief focus is on how New Testament and early Christian texts work together within the wider context of the Jewish and Greco-Roman world. His most recent work examines a wide array of sources—not only literary, but also papyrological and epigraphical—in order to discover how ancient audiences other than learned elites may have received the Christian message.