Bryan’s research has been committed to developing a theory of subjectivity, alterity, performance, and social change, what he calls “transversal theory.” In conjunction, he has worked to develop, often in collaboration with other scholars, a critical methodology for conducting research across academic disciplines that reflects the theory. The combined theory and “investigative-expansive mode” of analysis, and the aesthetics they together promote, he has termed “transversal poetics.” With transversal poetics, he has sought to resolve or expand on aspects of other critical methodologies and philosophies, from seventeenth-century absolutism and dualism to twentieth-century reductionism and poststructuralism, in an effort to create an approach to critical inquiry, sociohistorical investigation, and pedagogy that is conscientious, adaptable, collaborative, and fun.

Transversal Performance: Shakespace, the September 11 Attacks and the Critical Future

Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations: Theaterspace, Paused Consciousness, Subjunctivity, and Macbeth

Shakespearean Emergences: Back from Materialisms to Transversalisms and Beyond [coming soon]

Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, Co-Editor, with William West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Also at Google Books.

Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, Co-Editor, with Donald Hedrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Also at Google Books.

“The reckoning of moll cutpurse: a transversal enterprise” with Janna Segal. In Rogues and early modern English culture, edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 2004

“The Making of Authorships: Transversal Navigation in the Wake of Hamlet” with D.J. Hopkins. In Shakespeare After Mass Media, edited by Richard Burt, 2002

“Untimely Ripped: Mediating Witchcraft in Polanski and Shakespeare.” In The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, edited by Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann, 2002.

“Venetian ideology or transversal power? Iago’s motives and the means by which Othello falls” with Joseph Fitzpatrick. In Othello: new critical essays, edited by Philip C. Kolin, 2002

“Becoming a body without organs: the masochistic quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In Deleuze & Guattari: new mappings in politics, philosophy, and culture; edited by Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, 1998