Vera Schwarcz (born 1947[1]) (Chinese: 舒衡哲) is an American historian, who was the Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University.

[2] From 1979 to 1980, she studied at Peking University as part the first group of American students admitted after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China.

She is the author of eight books, including the prize-winning Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (Yale University Press, 1999) as well as Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu (Yale, 1986); The Chinese Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1984), and Place and Memory in Singing Crane Garden (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

She is also the author of numerous books of poetry including A Scoop of Light and In The Garden of Memory—a collaboration with the Prague-born Israeli artist Chava Pressburger,[3] and Ancestral Intelligence.

Built by the Manchu prince Mianyu in the mid-nineteenth century, the garden was intended to serve as a refuge from the clutter of daily life near the Forbidden City.