William Earl Betsch was born in East Orange, New Jersey on May 27, 1939. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1963. Afterwards, he studied under Richard Krautheimer at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (NYU). His Master’s thesis was entitled “Opus Sectile Pavements in the Early Christian Churches of Greece.” Betsch received a Master of Arts degree in Early Christian, Medieval, and Byzantine Art from NYU and continued his graduate work in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Supervised by Cecil Lee Striker, Betsch’s original project was to establish the chronology of the cisterns of Constantinople and determine the terminus ante quem for the capitals used in the cisterns. In 1970, he undertook a survey project in Istanbul for his dissertation research. While completing his survey project, he expanded the scope of his dissertation to the various stages of production, uses and re-uses, and impact of architectural capitals as an industry in Constantinople from the fourth through the sixth centuries CE. Betsch’s dissertation was entitled “The History, Production and Distribution of the Late Antique Capital in Constantinople” and was never published. Betsch completed his dissertation in 1977 and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Roman and Byzantine Art.

Betsch taught at the University of California, Riverside from 1970 to 1972. In 1972, he took a position at the University of Miami, Florida, where he remained as an Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Art in the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Arts and Sciences until his retirement in 2013. Betsch specializes in the art and architecture of Constantinople and is involved in researching the development of architecture in the Classical Greek era.