Harvard Saturday of Symposia

Felipe Pereda

Felipe Pereda is the Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art and Senior Thesis Advisor in the History of Art + Architecture Department at Harvard University. Born in Madrid, Pereda studied at the Universidad Complutense, and the Autónoma University where he received his PhD (1995) and taught until 2011. In more recent years, he has also taught at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (Universidad Autónoma de México), and Johns Hopkins University (2011-15). He has worked on Spanish late medieval and early modern art, art theory, image theory and history of architecture.

His books include La arquitectura elocuente (1999), El atlas del Rey Planeta (3rd. ed. 2003), and Images of Discord. Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in 15th century Spain (Spanish ed. 2007; English translation, Harvey Miller, 2018). Additionally, in recent years he has published on artists such as Luis de Morales, Ribera, or Zurbarán.

His last book was Crime and Illusion: The Art of Truth in the Spanish Golden Age (Brepols-Harvey Miller, 2018). According to an old historiographic tradition, the Spanish Golden Age placed the imitation of nature at the service of religion: its radical naturalism responded to the deep faith of that culture and moment. Crime & Illusion argues the opposite. It defends the thesis that the fundamental problem artists of the Golden Age confronted was not imitation but Truth. Moreover a large part, maybe the best part, of Spanish Baroque religious imagery is better understood as a complex exercise in addressing the spectators’ doubts. Hovering on the horizon of an emerging empiricism, artists created their images as pieces of evidence, arguments for belief. Crime & Illusion reconstructs and interprets this judicial or forensic aspect of early modern visual culture at the center of a political, religious, and scientific triangle. Finally, the book explores the artists’ skeptical reflection on the problematic relationship of painting and sculpture to the art of truth.

His newest book, Torrigiano. The Man who Broke Michelangelo's Nose, is in press with Penn State University. The book is the first biography ever written on the artist offering a model for the study of the relation between local artistic traditions and artist's mobility in the Renaissance.

Daniela Schwarzer

Prof. Dr. Daniela Schwarzer is Executive Director of the Open Society Foundations in Europe and Central Asia. She is an honorary professor of political science at Freie Universität Berlin and became a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center in 2020.

Schwarzer is a renowned expert in European affairs and transatlantic and international relations. Her research interests include European, German and French foreign policy, geoeconomics, democratic resilience and question of legitimate governance in an interconnected and polarized world and economic governance of the euro area. She was a special advisor to European leaders such as EU High Representative Josep Borrell and to countries including Poland and France during the preparation of their EU Council presidencies.

Prior to joining Open Society, Schwarzer was director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Before this, she served on the executive team of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Prior to working at the fund, Schwarzer lead the research department on Europe at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). She has also worked as an opinion page editor and France correspondent for the Financial Times Deutschland.

Schwarzer has held positions as a lecturer, researcher and academic fellow at institutions including at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Hertie School of Governance.

She serves as non-executive board member of BNP Paribas and Covivio, the Jacques Delors Institute and the German Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the advisory council of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Amy Wagers

Amy Wagers is the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, Senior Investigator in the Section on Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Co-chair of the department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard, an HHMI Early Career Scientist, and a member of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wagers received her PhD in Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis from Northwestern University, and completed postdoctoral training in stem cell biology at Stanford University.

Wagers’s research seeks to understand how changes in stem cell activity impact tissue homeostasis and repair throughout life. Work from her lab provides evidence for the existence of a conserved systemic regulatory axis that modulates tissue maintenance and regeneration across a wide variety of tissues that vary significantly in their intrinsic repair capacity, and her ongoing studies have begun to identify the molecules responsible for age-variant regulation of regenerative potential. Dr. Wagers has authored more than 100 primary research and review articles, and her work has been recognized by awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Beckman Foundation, WM Keck Foundation, and Glenn Foundation, and National Institutes of Health. In 2013, she received the New York Stem Cell Foundation’s Robertson Prize for outstanding achievement in translational stem cell research.

John Manning

John F. Manning is the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, whose faculty he joined in 2004. He was Bruce Bromley Professor of Law from 2007–2017 and Deputy Dean from 2013–2017. Prior to coming to Harvard, Manning was the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he began teaching in 1994. Manning teaches administrative law, federal courts, legislation and regulation, separation of powers, and statutory interpretation. His writing focuses on statutory interpretation and structural constitutional law. Manning is a co-editor of Hart & Wechsler’s Federal Courts and the Federal System (6th ed., 2009) (with Richard Fallon, Daniel Meltzer, and David Shapiro), and Legislation and Regulation (2d ed., 2013) (with Matthew Stephenson). Prior to entering teaching, Manning served as an assistant to the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice (1991-94), an associate in the D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (1989-91), and an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice (1986-88). He served as a law clerk to Hon. Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-89) and to Hon. Robert H. Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1985-86). Manning graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985 and Harvard College in 1982. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.