Pedro Germano Leal has obtained his PhD in Text and Image Studies at the University of Glasgow in 2014, with the thesis The Invention of Hieroglyphs: a Theory for the Transmission of Hieroglyphs in Early-Modern Europe, currently being prepared for publication. Presently he is a Visiting Lecturer in Early-Modern Iconography and Emblematics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, where he coordinates Project IRIS (Iconographic Repertoire Identification System), a research group dedicated to designing a code to ascribe iconographic functions to Iconclass categories used to index images in digital databases. Previously, he has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain, 2014) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Kiel (Germany, 2015). In 2014, he was nominated and elected a member of the Advisory Board of the Society for Emblem Studies, and invited to be a member of the Editorial Board of Imago: Revista de Emblemática y Cultura Visual (Universitat de València, Spain). In the following year, he was also nominated a member of the Advisory Board of the Sociedad Española de Emblemática. Leal has a strong research interest in Emblem Studies, Early Modern Iconology and Literature, and Visual Culture with an emphasis in Colonial Iberian America. His edited volume, Emblems in Ibero-America, is the first book in English dedicated to the emblematic culture in Ibero-America, for the prestigious Glasgow Emblem Studies series, distributed by Libraire Droz.
