Zachary Yuzwa is Assistant Professor of History at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. He received his PhD in 2014 from Cornell University. His primary research interest is the Latin literature of late antiquity, and his work regularly addresses the literary interface between classical Latin and late ancient Christian hagiography. He has written on Latin hagiography and classical genres; epistolography and epistolarity in late ancient literature; the function of the dialogue form in Latin hagiography (in particular a fifth-century dialogue by the Roman author Sulpicius Severus). He teaches broadly in the literature and history of the classical and late ancient world.

But living and working on the Canadian prairies has compelled him to think more carefully about the relationship between Classics and colonization in what we now call the Americas. He is the principal investigator of a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that aims to explore the use of classical literature and ancient history in the writings of Jesuit missionaries to New France. A forthcoming article, which draws on that research, is entitled "The Fall of Troy in Old Huronia: The Latin Letters of Paul Ragueneau on the Destruction of Wendake, 1649-1651". This piece traces the use of allusions to Virgilian epic in a series of letters written by the French Jesuit and mission superior, Paul Ragueneau, and argues that these intertexts function to link Jesuit missionary activity in the "new world" to an imagined classical past.

Classical Receptions Early Christianity Hagiography Late Antiquity Later Roman Empire Latin Literature

Ph.D., Cornell University

M.A., Cornell University

M.A., University of Alberta

B.A. (First Class Honours), University of Alberta