William James Bouwsma (November 22, 1923 – March 2, 2004) was an American scholar and historian of the European Renaissance.
He was Sather Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1978.
Upon graduation from Harvard, he joined the United States Army Air Forces where he spent three years as a classification specialist stationed in Denver, Colorado and became a buck sergeant.
Bouwsma taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign until 1957 when he accepted a position in the History Department at U.C.
[5][6] In 1992, he received the inaugural Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association.