I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (2008) where my primary focus was late eighteenth to mid-twentieth century German, French and English literature and visual culture. The challenge motivating my research and my teaching is to articulate the extent and configurations of the subject’s aesthetic freedom – I call it his adventure – in the face of limiting, regulating discourses, primarily legal, political and scientific. I wrote on spies, on exploration and the concept of adventure and on translation and exile.

I have taught in the US and in Turkey before returning to Israel.

Held a bachelor's degree in classical studies from Tel Aviv University, and a master's and doctoral degree from the University of Geneva in Switzerland (Russian studies and comparative literature).

David Fishelov is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He got his BA in Poetics and Comparative Literature and in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University, his MA in Poetics and Comparative Literature from Tel Aviv University and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. David Fishelov also taught as a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the EHESS in Paris. He authored four books: Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory (1993), Studies in Poetic Simile (1996, in Hebrew), Samson's Locks: The Transformations of Biblical Samson (2000, in Hebrew; winner of the first Bahat Prize), and Dialogues with/and Great Books: The Dynamics of Canon Formation (2010), and published about fifty scholarly articles in edited volumes and academic journals such as Poetics, Style, Poetics Today, New Literary History and Connotations.

Carola Hilfrich is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and founder of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Originally from Germany, where she studied Literature and Philosophy at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, she conducted her doctoral research in German Literature and Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University. She has been a Fellow of the Hebrew University's Institute for Advanced Studies' research group on "Ethnography and Literature" in 2005, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Friedrich Schlegel School of Literary Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. Since 2012, she is a founding member of the Hebrew University's I-CORE "Da'at Hamakom Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Jewish World."

In her work, she focuses on the poetics and politics of contact zone writing in the historical contexts of modernity and contemporaneity, as well as on questions of circulation and mediation. She is author of Living Script (in German, Fink: 2000), a book on theories of cultural representation in 18^th century Jewish German Thought, and co-editor of Between Cultures: Theory and Praxis of Cross-Cultural Dialogue (Niemeyer: 1997) and Fields of Belonging: Passages of Jewish Literatures (to be published in De Gruyter's Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts series in 2017). Her current research explores questions of place and movement in contemporary literatures, focusing on choreographies between the body, imagination, and the built environment.

Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Center for Literary Studies.  She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. She taught at Princeton University in 1990-1992 and as Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 1996 and in 2006 and at Harvard in 2012.  During the fall of 2009 she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn and in fall of 2017 she was a fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University.  Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of gender, aesthetics and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville's Bibles (University of California, 2008); Agnon's Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, 2019), Ruth: The Migrant Gleaner (Yale University Press, Jewish Lives, 2022).

Gur Zak (PhD Toronto 2008), is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies and Academic Head of the Institute of Literatures.

His research concentrates on the interrelations of ethics, literature, and the emotions in the later Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance, with a particular emphasis on the writings of the “Three Crowns”: Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. He is the author of the monographs Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge, 2010) and Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature (Toronto, 2022), and co-editor of several volumes, including Petrarchan Passions: Affects and Community Formation in the Renaissance World (with B. Huss and T. Kircher, Berlin, 2022). He is also the editor and co-translator of the volume Wandering to Other Times: Francesco Petrarca, Selected Writings (Jerusalem, 2023), the first translation of Petrarch’s Latin works into Hebrew. His articles have appeared in journals such as Speculum, Modern Language Notes, I Tatti Studies, and Mediaevalia. His current research project deals with the literary shaping of the emotions of compassion, envy, anger, and forgiveness in the turn from the later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period.

Tzachi Zamir is a philosopher and a literary critic (Assoc. Prof. English & Comp. Lit). Zamir is the author of Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, 2006), Ethics and the Beast (Princeton, 2007), and Acts: Theater, Philosophy and the Performing Self (The University of Michigan Press, 2014).

He is currently editing a collection of articles on Hamlet and philosophy for Oxford University Press and has recently completed a manuscript offering a philosophical reading of Milton's Paradise Lost.

I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of General and Comparative Literature and a member of the PhD honors program at the the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. My MA thesis, titled "Ishmael’s Speculative Play with Whiteness: A Philosophical Reading of the Ludic Poetics of Moby-Dick," was dedicated to the study of Herman Melville's masterpiece. In my doctoral research (supervised by Prof. Ilana Pardes) I provide a comparative reading of Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The major focus of this project is the topos of the quest, understood in ethical-spiritual, linguistic-poetic, and historical-national terms. Through this analysis, I hope to trace the interrelations between the ethical and philosophical issues at stake in these works and the poetic strategies the three authors employ in treating them. I also seek to trace the intertextual affinities between the  three novels, as well as Nabokov's dialogue with two of his nineteenth-century predecessors.

Shachar Livne is a PhD Candidate in the General and Comparative Literature Department and a Doctoral Fellow at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. 

Her PhD dissertation is titled “Vision and Revision: (re)writing dreams in 14th century poetry from Dante to Chaucer,” and it is being written under the supervision of Dr. Gur Zak. She was the recipient of the Individual Research Scholarship of the Center for the Study of Italian Culture at the Hebrew University in 2015-6, and she has spent a year of research at Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy) during her MA studies, and a semester as a visiting PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

Betty Rojtman,  Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taught in the Department of French Studies and the Department of General and Comparative Literature, where she held the Katherine Cornell Chair. 

Born in Paris, Betty Rojtman received her Ph.D. (on Samuel Beckett) at the Sorbonne. She chaired the Department of French Studies from 1989 to 1992, founded and chaired the Desmarais Research Center for French Culture from 1992 to 1998. In 1993, she taught as visiting professor at the University of Montreal. From 1996 to 2009 she presented  seminars at the College International de Philosophie in Paris.  In 2004-2005 she was invited as Directeur de Recherches at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and in 2007 was designated as a delegate to the Fonds Paul Ricoeur in Israel.  In 2011, she was invited as a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris.

Her present fields of interest are modern French literature and thought as well as Jewish hermeneutics and its interaction with contemporary trends in the humanities. She has published over fifty articles in various academic journals in the fields of literature, text theory, philosophy, and Jewish studies.  Among her published books are: Feu noir sur feu blanc. Essai sur l'herméneutique juive, Verdier, 1986. [Black Fire on White Fire, An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to Kabbalah, prefaced by Moshe Idel, trans. Steven Rendall, The University of California Press, 1998] ; Une grave distraction [A grave Distraction], prefaced by Paul Ricoeur, Balland, 1991 ; Une Rencontre improbable. Equivoques de la destinée, Paris, Gallimard, 2002.

 Betty Rojtman has also written poetical essays, based on Jewish hermeneutics and Biblical studies :

Le pardon à la lune. Essai sur le tragique biblique, Paris, Gallimard, 2001. [Seli’hat halevana, Al hatragiut hatana’hit, trans. Nir Ratzkovski, Jerusalem, Carmel, 2008.] Moïse, prophète des nostalgies, Paris, Gallimard, 2007, 191 p.

She recently completed a comprehensive essay  on the fascination of death in  contemporary French writings, including chapters on Kojève, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Lacan. She is currently experimenting in literary and existential writing.

Professor Moshe Ron (b. Tel Aviv, 1945), B.A. in Romance Languages and English Literature from Hebrew University (1968), Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University (1975, dissertation directed by Paul de Man). Resarched and wrote on various aspects of narrative theory, on portrait stories and the uncanny as well as on contemporary American and Hebrew fiction. Retired in 2007. Has worked concurrently and subsequently as literary editor and translator.