James Douglas Bruce (1862-1923) received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Virginia. He was a graduate student at the University of Berlin from 1886 to 1888, and he attended the University of Strassburg in 1888. From 1889 to 1890, he was a student at Johns Hopkins University and received the PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1894. He was professor of modern languages at Centre College (Danville, Kentucky) in 1890–91. He was associate in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Bryn Mawr College from 1891 to 1897 and associate professor of English Philology at Bryn Mawr in 1897–1900. He joined the UT faculty as head of the English Department in 1900—a position he held until his death. (He suffered a stroke while teaching a class on February 14, 1923, and was carried by students in a chair to the infirmary, still muttering the lecture his stroke had interrupted.) He died February 19, 1923.
He was internationally known for his scholarship in Old English, Middle English, and the Arthurian Romance and was especially well known for The Evolution of Arthurian Romance (2 vols., 1923). He held the presidencies of the Modern Language Association, the American Dialect Society, and the International Chaucerian Society.
His library of 6,340 books was valued at $25,000 at his death in 1923. He donated his library and an additional $5,000 to be used exclusively for the purchase of books for the English Department to the UT Library. His gift of books increased the holdings of the library by over 10 percent and formed the nucleus of the library’s strong medieval holdings.
The following fall, Bruce was memorialized in volume 26, number 3 of the UT Record, and again in 1948 when a section of Melrose Hall was named after him.
In 1970 the English Department commissioned Anita Woods to paint a portrait of Bruce, which was unveiled in January 1971. His contributions to the intellectual life of the university were recognized by the placement of a plaque in his honor on a faculty study in 1986.
Bruce was also honored in Betsey B. Creekmore’ Special Collections and University Archives, “Scribes, Scholars, and Students” exhibit in 2007 during the university’s Medieval and Renaissance Semester where “The Contributions of Professor James Douglas Bruce” was one of four themes in the exhibition.