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.