Simon J Bronner

Life and career

Bronner’s parents were Polish-Jewish 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 Binghamton University (B.A., 1974) and then he received his M.A. in American Folk Culture at the Cooperstown Graduate Programs of the State University of New York (1977), where he also studied social history, ethnology, and museum studies (including work with historically oriented ethnologists Louis C. Jones, Bruce Buckley, and Roderick Roberts). He stayed in Cooperstown to work for the New York State Historical Association as director of the Archive of New York State Folklife, before moving to Indiana University, Bloomington, where he completed his Ph.D. in Folklore and American Studies (1981) and worked for the Indiana University Museum of History, Anthropology, and Folklore (now the Mathers Museum of World Cultures), and was assistant to Richard M. Dorson on the Journal of the Folklore Institute (now the Journal of Folklore Research). In 1981, he became assistant professor of American Studies and folklore at the Pennsylvania State University 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, founding director of the college's doctoral program in American Studies in 2008 (and subsequently chair of the expanding program that included B.A., M.A., Ph.D., and two certificate programs in folklore and ethnography and heritage and museum studies), 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). In 2011, he was named the editor of the Encyclopedia of American Studies online (published by Johns Hopkins University Press). 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 and the Encyclopedia of American Folklife was designated an outstanding academic title by Choice and "Editor's Choice" by Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin for 2006. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship in 1984 at the Winterthur Museum, Rockefeller Foundation 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 material culture and folklife (particularly in folk art and architecture) in books such as American Material Culture and Folklife, Folk Art and Art Worlds, The Carver’s Art, and Grasping Things, consumer culture (Consuming Visions), history and theory of folklore studies (Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture and American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History), ethnic studies (particularly for Jews, Pennsylvania Germans, and African Americans), ritual and belief (Crossing the Line), masculinity studies (Manly Traditions), American roots music (blues and old-time music) in Old-Time Music Makers of New York State, animal-human relations (in practices such as hunting and gaming), and developmental psychology and culture across the life course (particularly in childhood and old age) in American Children’s Folklore, Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life, and Chain Carvers: Old Men Crafting Meaning. He has also contributed to the study of literary journalism with Lafcadio Hearn's America and articles offering a psychological profile of the famous nineteenth century writer Lafcadio Hearn 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.