Biography

Gur Zak is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His primary research interests lie in understanding the relationship between ethics and literature in the Italian Renaissance. His book Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Zak also authored articles and book-chapters on Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the history of autobiography. He is currently working on his second book, which deals with self-cultivation in Italian humanism from Boccaccio to Poliziano. His research was supported by various fellowships, among them The Israeli Science Foundation Research Fellowship.   

Project summary

This project explores the various ideals and techniques of self-cultivation that proliferated in Italian humanism from 1350 to 1500. It focuses especially on the tensions between the humanists' return to ancient ascetic traditions on one hand and their engagement with more literary forms of self-cultivation on the other.