James Wilson Bright (1852–1926) was an American philologist active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Bright completed his undergraduate education at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

During the 1861-1862 school year, a competition was initiated at the school to find the member of the senior class "deemed to be the most proficient in English Philology as demonstrated by a written discussion of the language of some English classic.

In 1876, during the time Bright attended Lafayette, the subject of the prize was the study of American poet William Cullen Bryant.

After teaching briefly at Cornell, he returned to Johns Hopkins in 1885, where he oversaw the development of the English program.