| Simon Bronner |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT SIMON J. BRONNER | |
| american historians | |
| bronner, simon j. | |
| american folklorists | |
| pennsylvania state university faculty | |
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LIFE AND CAREER Bronner’s parents were Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States from Israel in 1960. His childhood in the U.S. was spent in Chicago and New York City. His undergraduate study was in political science, history, and folklore (mentored by prominent European and American folklorist W.F.H. Nicolaisen) at in the graduate American Studies Program at Harrisburg, and was promoted to the rank of Distinguished University Professor in 1991. He has also taught as Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Cultural Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands(2006), Visiting Professor of Folklore and the History of American Civilization at Harvard University (1997-1998), Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Osaka University in Japan (1996-1997), and Visiting Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University Of California At Davis (1991). In 1990, he was founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg . He served as Coordinator of the American Studies Program at the college from 1987 to 2002, and received the Mary Turpie Prize from the American Studies Association in recognition of his program building, teaching, and advising. From 2002 to 2003, he served as interim director of the School of Humanities at the college. He also received awards for research, teaching, and service from the college. He has edited the journals '' Folklore Historian '' (1983-1989), '' Material Culture '' (1983-1986), and book series ''American Material Culture and Folklife'' (UMI Research Press), ''Material Worlds'' ( University Press of Kentucky ), ''Pennsylvania German History and Culture'' ( Pennsylvania State University Press ), and ''Jewish Cultural Studies'' ( Littman Library of Jewish Civilization ). He was elected to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society in 1994 and received the Wayland Hand Prize for best article on history and folklore and the Peter And Iona Opie Prize for best book on children’s folklore from the Society. He also received the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize and Regional Council of Historical Societies Award of Merit for ''Old-Time Music Makers of New York State''. He received a National Endowment For The Humanities Research Fellowship in 1984 at the Winterthur Museum , Rockefeller Foundatio n Fellowship (1978-1981), and two Fulbright Program lecturing awards (1996-1997, 2006). He is married to Sally Jo (Kahr) Bronner; they have two children. ACADEMIC AND PUBLIC FOCUS Much of Bronner’s scholarship has been on the issue of Tradition , especially in relation to Modernity , Folk Culture and Popular Culture , and Creativity . He has been an advocate of "structuralist" and “symbolist” approaches to the interpretation of cultures integrating historical, ethnographic, and psychological perspectives with particular attention to developmental issues across the life course. He has also highlighted the politics of tradition and culture and the ways that contested public debates can be symbolically analyzed in behavioral, material, and verbal rhetoric to show systems of belief and communication in conflict. Examples are the Animal Rights protest movement, the national campaign of Joseph Lieberman for vice-president, and anti- Hazing campaigns in the Navy. He has proposed in ''Grasping Things'' and other works an analytical perspective on “praxis,” i.e., cultural practices and processes that symbolize socially shared ways of thinking and draw attention to tradition as an adaptive strategy. Many of his essays raise questions about traditions regarding the personal motivations and psychological states, historical conditions and precedents, social identities, and underlying mental processes that explain the function and persistence of cultural expressions. Bronner's main area of study has been the United States and he has been a figure in the academic development of American cultural studies. He has also promoted international comparative studies, with field research in Japan, Poland, England, Israel, and the Netherlands. Bronner’s major scholarly contributions have been in the topics of who worked in America and Japan. He edited the most comprehensive reference work in American folklife studies, ''Encyclopedia of American Folklife'' , in 4 volumes (2006). Bronner has been active in the public sector, serving as consultant to many museums, festivals, and historical and cultural organizations. These activities combine with his development of the academic field of heritage studies, also called “public heritage,” focusing on issues of public presentations of history, art, and culture, especially as communities interpret their legacies for themselves. His book ''Popularizing Pennsylvania'' (1996), for example, examined the links of Progressive politics, environmental conservation, and public history and folklore in the career of Henry W. Shoemaker (1880-1958), America’s first official state folklorist, chairman of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, ambassador to Bulgaria (1930-1933), and prominent newspaper publisher. Bronner has been the project scholar for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Oral History Project, chair of the Cultural Heritage Advisory Board for the Pennsylvania Heritage Affairs Commission, and reviewer for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. BOOKS
Annotated Edition, 1989.
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