Gur Zak a senior lecturer at the department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been teaching since 2009. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2008. His primary research interest lies in the interrelations between literature and ethics in the later Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance, with a particular emphasis on the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. His first book, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self, was published by Cambridge UP in 2010. His second book is entitled Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature. His current research project deals with literary, philosophical, and theological attitudes to compassion in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He has published articles on medieval and Renaissance literature in journals such as Speculum, MLN, and I Tatti Studies, and have contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, and The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature. Besides his work on Italian Renaissance Literature, he is also interested in the history of autobiography from antiquity to the present and contemporary theories of affects.