Professor Bruce Brown worked as Dean of the University of Brighton’s College of Arts and Humanities and later as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Brighton.

In the mid-1960s, Bruce Brown attended the Liverpool School of Art before going on to complete his studies at the Canterbury College of Art, then at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1973 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts after winning an RSA Bursary to study in Florence. This was followed by grants from the Royal College of Art to support field studies in Peru that investigated the design principles of Pre-Columbian civilizations.

Before entering Higher Education, Bruce Brown worked as a practicing designer and was for some years the art director of CRAFTS for the UK Crafts Council. As a researcher he specialised in design research with an emphasis on the social and cultural effects of visual memory and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2004.

Bruce Brown was a founding member of the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s (AHRB) Postgraduate Panel for Visual Arts, has served on the executive committee of the UK Council for Graduate Education and was a Council member of the Higher Education Academy. He served as trustee and director to organisations that included the Art’s Council for England’s South East Arts Board and the Ditchling Museum. He was an international advisor to the Shpilman Institute for Photography in Israel, a member of the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation, and helped to initiate the Brighton Photographic Biennale.

Bruce Brown served an Editor of Design Issues Research Journal (MIT Press), a member of the Editorial Board for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: an international journal of theory, research and practice (Sage) and the editorial steering group for a Handbook for Research in the Arts (Routledge).  He delivered papers and keynote presentations that include: Design and Ethics at the University of the Arts Budapest; the Third International Conference of the Arts in Society, Birmingham; Graphic Memory at Ontario’s National Design Conference; ‘The Design of Memory’ at Shenkar College of Design and Engineering, Tel Aviv; Objekte der Erinnerung at Zukunftsbilder fürs Design in Potsdam; ‘Memory is the Message’ at the ISEA conference in Chicago and at Environs the Graphic Designers of Canada National Conference. He served the research assessment exercises, being Main Panel O (Arts) for  RAE2008 and one of four Main Panel Chairs for REF2014 with responsibility for Main Panel D (Arts and Humanities).