William Norman Bryson (born 1949) is an Anglo American art historian who authored several major works that were particularly influential in the 1980s and 1990s. He graduated with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1977, and subsequently worked as a professor at King's College until 1988, when he moved to Rochester, NY. There, he worked for two years at the University of Rochester before moving to Harvard University in 1990.[1] In a shift from that earlier period, he now is faculty at University of California, San Diego, and primarily writes about contemporary art, such as Sharon Lockhart. His career is characterized by a move to a more literary theory-based approach to art history,[2] including Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (1983), Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1986), and Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1987). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997.[3]
