Marina Bazzani, Lector at the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, teaches Latin, Greek and Byzantine Greek. Her research focuses on Byzantine learned and encomiastic poetry of the middle and late Byzantine period (10th to 14th century), with particular emphasis on personal elements as a key to understand the historical and social context in which poets operated. She is also interested in the transmission and reception of Classics in Byzantium, and in the ways in which Church Fathers and Byzantine authors adapted and alluded to classical texts in their own work. In her publications on the poetry of Symeon the New Theologian, Theodore Prodromos, and Manuel Philes she explored how allusions and specific linguistic choices often conceal criticism and numerous levels of meaning.
Having undertaken the study of Classical Armenian, she extended her research spectrum beyond Byzantium by adding a cross-cultural perspective: she engages with a comparative study of Greek and Armenian authors, in particular Symeon the New Theologian and Grigor of Narek, and with Armenian translations of Greek texts, which frequently are key for textual transmission of Greek authors.
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