Norman Bryson

Professor Emeritus

nrbryson@ucsd.edu

Biography

Prior to joining the Department in 2003, Norman Bryson taught at Cambridge, Rochester, Harvard, and London Universities. At King’s College, Cambridge, he was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English. At the University of Rochester he was the first Director of the newly formed PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies. He was professor of art history at Harvard from 1990 to 1998, when he moved to London to direct the PhD program in Visual and Theoretical Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. He is currently Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in the areas of eighteenth-century art history, critical theory, and contemporary art. Over the past five years, contemporary art has been at the forefront of his writing, complemented by teaching in fine art schools (rather than art history departments) including Goldsmiths College, London, the Jan van Eyck Academy at Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Bryson current research and teaching focus on modern art and visual culture in the West, China and Japan, on photography, and on the philosophy of visual representation.