Bryan Reynolds (PhD Harvard University; AB UC Berkeley) is Professor, Chancellor’s Fellow, and Head of Doctoral Studies in Drama and Theatre at the University of California, Irvine. His research spans several disciplines, including critical theory, history, performance studies, social semiotics, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and dramatic literature, especially of the English Renaissance. It focuses on the experience, articulation, and performance of consciousness, subjectivity, and sociocultural formations, particularly the ideologies, passions, and geographies that define them, both on and off the stage.

Bryan is also a playwright, director of theater, and cofounder of the Transversal Theater Company, whose productions of Bryan’s plays Unbuckled, Woof, Daddy, Railroad, and Blue Shade have toured, respectively, Romania (June 2004), Poland (April 2005), Romania (May/June 2006), and the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania (May/June/November 2007) in addition to performances in California and New York. The company’s production of his new play, Lumping in Fargo, will be performed at the 2008 Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival in Poland as well as at other venues in the United States and abroad.

Bryan’s scholarly publications include Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002), co-edited with William West, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and co-edited with Donald Hedrick, Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). He has also published three plays, Unbuckled (2004), Railroad (2006), and Blue Shade (2007). His next book, Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2008.

Among other projects, Bryan is currently writing two books, Unreal Mockery: Consciousness Explored in Early Modern England and, with Mark LeVine, Microcosmos: Our Violence and the Future of Happiness; and, with John Rouse, he is co-editing, Scales of Production: Performance, Politics, and Globalization.

Bryan is also co-General Editor, with Elaine Aston, of a book series in theatre and performance studies, Performance Interventions, from Palgrave Macmillan.

For more information, see his curriculum vitae and personal website: bryanreynolds.com.