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Shachar Livne, Lecturer

Contact Info

The Open University of Israel Department of Literature, Language and Arts 1 University Road, P. O. Box 808, Raanana 43107, Israel
Email:shacharli@openu.ac.il

Areas of Interest
  • Literary Reception
  • Translation and Adaptation
  • The Italian Trecento
  • Medieval and Tudor England
  • Poetry and Poetics
  • Women and Sexualities
  • Canon formation

I am a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, working mostly between Italian and English poetry. More specifically, I study the works of the Italian Trecento - Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio - while also tracing how later readers engaged with it: how they received it, what they did to it in translation, and how they adapted it to different ends. These different readers take me to different times and locations: north into late medieval England, and forward in history into the Renaissance and the Baroque, where both Jewish and Christian Italians took up these canonical poems for their own commitments and purposes.

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2015–2021
PhD in Comparative Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supervised by Prof. Gur Zak, "De-authorizing Dante: Authorship and Readership in Dante and his fourteenth-century Poetic Heirs"
2011–2014
M.A. (summa cum laude) in Comparative Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2009–2011
B.A. (magna cum laude) in Comparative Literature and Theater Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2026–   Lecturer, Department of Languages, Literature and the Arts, The Open University of Israel

2022–2026 Postdoctoral Fellow, The Polonsky Academy, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

2021–2023 Adjunct lecturer, English Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2021–2022 Postdoctoral Fellow, Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2020–2021
Postdoctoral Fellow, English Department, Tel Aviv University
2017–2021
Azrieli Doctoral Fellowship
2016-2017
Travel Grant Award to the University of Pennsylvania, Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2015-2019
President's Fellowship for Honorary Doctoral Students in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2015-2018
Hoffman Doctoral Fellowship (declined), Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2015-2016
Individual Research Grant, The European Forum, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2014
M.A. Graduates' Valedictorian, Faculty of Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2014
Leah Goldberg Award for Outstanding Academic Achievements, Comparative Literature Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2013-2014
Erasmus Mundus Research Fellowship, University of Padua, Italy
2012-2013
Deanʼs List and Scholarship for MA Honors Students, Faculty of Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2012
Gutwirth Foundation Award for MA Honors Students, Technion
2011-2012
Deanʼs List for Honorable MA students, Faculty of Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2011
 Leah Goldberg Award for Outstanding Academic Achievements, Comparative Literature Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2010-2011
Deanʼs List for Honorable BA students, Faculty of Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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“‘And unto me a Troylus be’: Isabella Whitney’s Chaucerian inheritance in ‘To Her Unconstant Lover’ (1566–1567),” Early Modern Women 20.2 (2026): 221–48

“The Garden of Delights in Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione: Desacralizing Dante’s Paradiso 23,” Mediaevalia: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies 46 (2025): 141–64.

“La Storia in Hebrew: A History,” Annali d’Italianistica 42 (2024): 175–97. (link)

“Effacing the Poet: Mary Sidney Herbret translates Petrarch’s Triumphi,” English Studies 104.3 (2023): 442–59. (link)

“On Truth, Pietà, and Reader Response in Dante’s Purgatory 10 and Chaucer’s House of Fame 1,” Studies in Philology 118.4 (2021): 605–30. (link)