Simon Bronner, Ph.D. - Holiday Folklore and Traditions
Program Date: December 3, 2025
Simon J. Bronner, an American folklorist, ethnologist, historian, sociologist, educator, college dean, and author is the former Dean of the College of General Studies and Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Much of Bronner's scholarship has been on the issue of tradition, especially in relation to modernity, folk culture, popular culture, and creativity. 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 and anti-hazing campaigns in the Navy. He has proposed an analytical perspective on 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.
He has taught internationally from Harvard University, to Leiden University (Netherlands), to Osaka University (Japan), Dickinson College, and Penn State University as well as Scholar in Residence at the Latvian Academy of Culture, and as visiting scholar at Beijing Normal University. He was the founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies and the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies at Penn State. He is the author or editor of over 40 books and journal articles with many awards and honors for his scholarship, program development and lifetime achievement.
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 folklorists. He received his M.A. in American Folk Culture at the Cooperstown Graduate Programs of the State University of New York where he also studied social history, ethnology, and museum studies. He completed his Ph.D. in Folklore and American Studies at Indiana University (1981) and worked for the Indiana University Museum of History, Anthropology, and Folklore. 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. In 2018, the American Folklore Society bestowed its Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award on Bronner. In 2019, Dr. Bonner became Dean of the College of General Studies and distinguished professor of social sciences at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Further information on Bonner’s wide-ranging and distinguished career can be found on the Wikipedia page cited below.