Zvi Gilboa joined the University of Virginia in Fall 2011. His research primarily lies in the fields of Transnational Studies, German Literature and Culture, and Transnational Literature in Hebrew, and places special emphasis on the cultural and literary authorship of non-native speakers. Zvi's interest in languages is not limited to those that are "merely spoken"; he holds degrees in piano performance from Tel-Aviv University and Indiana University and has long been immersed in several computer languages, most notably Pascal, C, SQL, and PostScript.

Language and technology intersect in Zvi's teaching in a variety of areas and are also at the heart of the assessment method he devised for the Modern Hebrew program, nick-named Show What You Know. Instead of taking traditional vocabulary quizzes, for instance, students in the program record videos in which they demonstrate their mastery of the vocabulary at stake. Assessment of grammar and oral proficiency takes place in a similar manner, and students thus record during the semester a large number of videos, each of which dedicated to a specific grammatical or conversational topic.