A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (once for his BA and then again for his PhD), Bryant  Simon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of History and the Academic Chair of the University Honors Program at  Temple University in Philadelphia. He is also the 2020 recipient of Temple’s Great Teacher Award. He is the author  of four books, three co-edited collections, and numerous essays and commentary that have appeared in the  Washington Post, New Republic, the Root.com, Christian Science Monitor, Public Books, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition, he has appeared as a talking head in documentaries about Starbucks, the history of American  Food, blue jeans, the Jersey shore, Monopoly (the board game) and Alabama-based rock and roll band, the Drive By Truckers. 

Simon is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Speaker, an elected member of the Society of the  American Historians, and the outgoing President of the Southern Labor Studies Association. He founded and runs  the Temple History Department's Global US Studies program that features graduate exchange with Erfurt  University (Germany), University of Cologne, and the Sorbonne. Currently, Simon is working on a book about the  history of the public bathroom in the United States to be published by the University of Chicago Press.