Event

Prof. Gur Zak, who heads the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will present a talk entitled: "Umana cosa è aver compassion: Compassion and Literary Empathy in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio." This event is co-sponsored by the Faculty Working Group in Global Medieval Studies. 

Prof. Zak 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. He recently completed a second book, 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 has 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.