Simon J. Bronner

Simon J. Bronner (Hebrew: סימון ברונר; born April 7 1954, in Haifa, Israel) is an American folklorist, ethnologist, historian, sociologist, educator, college dean, and author.

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 European and American folklorist W.F.H. Nicolaisen and political-social theorists Harold L. Nieburg and Louis C. Gawthrop) 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 at Oneonta (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). He was a scholar-in-residence at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga, Latvia, in fall 2017. In 2018-2019, he held the Maxwell C. Weiner distinguished professorship in humanities at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, part of the University of Missouri system.

In 1990, he was founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies (now the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore) and in 2007, the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg.