Associate Professor​ (Historical Studies) - School of Arts and Social Science

Email:  b56eb@mun.ca

Phone: (709) 637-2191

 

Research interests/expertise

• Protestant-Catholic relations in Early Modern France
• The use and design of databases
• Residential urban mapping using ArcGIS
• Reading Early Modern French manuscripts
• French Protestant refugee communities outside of France
• Confraternities in Early Modern France

Teaching

Dr. Bezzina teaches in the areas of Early Modern Europe, the Atlantic World, and New France. Dr. Bezzina is the recipient of the Grenfell Campus Student Union Teaching and Learning Award.  He is also the chair of the Grenfell Campus Teaching Committee.

 

Representative scholarly contributions

• “The Practice of Ecclesiastical Discipline in the Huguenot Refugee Church of Amsterdam, 1650-1700.”  Eds. Karen E. Spierling, Erik A. de Boer, and R. Ward Holder.  Emancipating Calvin: Culture and Confessional Identity in Francophone Reformed Communities.  Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2018.  147-174.
• “Urban Topography and Protestant-Catholic Dynamics in Loudun, 1560-1640.”  History Seminary Series, Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s Campus, 2019.

 

Current research projects and grants

Dr. Bezzina is at the writing stage of a book project on Protestant-Catholic relations in the French provincial town of Loudun from ca.1560-ca.1640, during and after the French Wars of Religion.  For this project, he has completed a large database using MS Access and is currently using ArcGIS for the mapping of residential patterns.  He has a published a number of articles on this town in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

Dr. Bezzina is also working on another research project involving a French Protestant refugee author from Loudun who settled in Amsterdam in the later seventeenth century; this author wrote an important book defending a French Catholic priest falsely accused and executed for witchcraft (in a well-known trial called the Grandier Affair).  Thus far, Dr. Bezzina has written two articles on the French Protestant refugee community in Amsterdam and would like to write a monograph about the author, his work, and his context.

Dr. Bezzina is also the editor of Confraternitas, the refereed, biannual journal of the Society for Confraternity Studies (f. 1989) (University of Toronto). The journal is devoted to research on all aspects of medieval and early modern confraternities, religious guilds, hevrot, tariqa, and futuwwa. As part of his interest in French religious confraternities, Dr. Bezzina has conducted research on the confraternities of the Poitou region and is currently presenting this research at scholarly conferences.