WELCOME! Welkom! Willkommen! Zayt Bagrist! Bienvenue! Witajcie! Irashaimasu! Huan Ying! Bruchim Habaim! Merhaba!
I have devoted my life and career broadly to the study of cultural history and psychological ethnology, and more specifically to interpreting American folklife and material culture. I invite you to look around the site for programming, projects, and publications that interest you in the many areas that radiate from this study. I hold the title of distinguished university professor of American Studies and folklore at Penn State Harrisburg and I have also taught at Harvard University, Osaka University (Japan), Leiden University (Netherlands), Dickinson College, University of California at Davis, and Utah State University. I have been the author or editor of over thirty books and currently edit two book series: Jewish Cultural Studies for Littman in Oxford, England and Material Worlds for the University Press of Kentucky. At Penn State Harrisburg, I direct the American Studies Program which offers doctoral, master's, and bachelor's degrees. I also am involved in outreach and research activities such as the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies, for which I serve as lead scholar, and the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies, for which I was the founding director. I have global interests and local involvement; I am active in public programming for arts, history, and culture partnering with a number of regional agencies, including the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Historical Society of Dauphin County. On this site, I have separated these endeavors into different tabs for you to browse and comment.
The banner on top, by the way, is a composite from a Pennsylvania German Bank Barn near Penn State Harrisburg that we fondly call "The Star Barn." I regularly lead students to the site to talk about material culture and we are working with its owner to establish a public educational center called "Agrarian Country." The picture of me you see is in my office showing a poster from the American Folklife Center. And to the left here, combining ancient and modern concerns is a photo showing a Jewish "yad" used to read the Torah being applied to the computer. (This comes to mind because of my recent work on "digital culture" or "cyberculture" and the Internet as a folk system). The image comes from a poster for an international conference I helped organize on Modern Jewish Culture in Wroclaw, Poland. The video I took below is of Highland Games in Pennsylvania and represents my new work in masculinity studies. My welcome message in different languages represents different cultures with which I have worked or visited: in order after English (I have studied customs of the British Isles as well as North America)--Netherlands, Germany, Yiddishland, France, Poland, Japan, China, Israel, and Arab and African American communities. 
