Bryant Simon
Recent US History, Cities and Urban Spaces, Consumer Culture, Politics, Labor, Ethnography, New South, Music and Society
My career as a writer and teacher has taken me to a lot of different places. I started out studying the history of workers and their ideas about politics and unions in the New South. After that, I wrote about fiction and history, masculinity and Progressive reform, the body and the state, legislative apportionment, and music – Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie’s – and society. More recently, I have begun to focus on race and class and the creation and destruction of urban spaces. My most recent book on Atlantic City, New Jersey explores these issues; issues I will return to in my current project, a study of Starbucks, the making (and distribution of) coffee house culture, and the molding of public culture in the United States and across the globe in the 21st century.