Ivo Novakovic, Ph.D.

BIC Courses: World Cultures I, II, III, & V; Social World II; Biblical Heritage

Dr. Ivo Novakovic joined the BIC faculty as a full-time Lecturer in 2012 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, USA.

His teaching load is 4/4. Over the past six years, he has taught BIC 1314 (World Cultures I), BIC 1324 (World Cultures II), BIC 2234 (World Cultures III), BIC 4374 (World Cultures V: Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa), BIC 4374 (World Cultures V: The Middle East and North Africa), BIC 2330 (Social World I), BIC 2340 (Social World II), and BIC 3358 (Biblical Heritage and Contemporary Ethical Issues). By arrangement with Baylor’s Great Texts, he has also taught GTX 2323 (Intellectual Traditions of the Ancient World). During this time, he had more than 800 students in my small groups.

Dr. Novakovic's research primarily engages topics closely connected to his teaching responsibilities, including ancient Egyptian religion; the Upanishads and Hindu epics (the Ramayana and Mahabharata); biblical law; Islamic legal schools; late medieval and early Renaissance literature (Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch); classical sociological theories (Durkheim and Weber); contemporary virtue, ecological, and animal ethics; and contemporary social, political, and cultural dimensions of Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East. In connection with his broader work in systematic theology, he investigates the development of the life sciences in the nineteenth century, their reception in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy and theology, and the concept of resurrection in relation to personal identity and philosophical anthropology.

In the area of service, he has served on multiple departmental search committees, the BIC Self-Study and Program Review Planning Committee, and the University Teaching, Learning, and Technology Committee. Since Fall 2025, he has also been serving as the Corse Coordinator for BIC 3358 (Biblical Heritage and Contemporary Ethical Issues).