Dr. Edwin Bezzina, BA (Queen’s), MA, PhD (University of Toronto)
Associate Professor (Historical Studies) - School of Arts and Social Science
Email:ebezzina@grenfell.mun.ca
Phone: (709) 637-2191
Website:
http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/~ebezzina/
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
Teaching
Dr. Bezzina teaches in the areas of Early Modern Europe, the Atlantic World, and New France.
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 working on 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 working with ArcGIS for the mapping of residential patterns. He has a published a number of articles on this town during this period. Dr. Bezzina is also working on another research project involving a French Protestant refugee from Loudun who settled in Amsterdam in the later seventeenth century; this refugee author wrote an important book defending a Catholic priest falsely accused and executed for witchcraft (a well-known trial known as 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.