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.

 

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.