Bryan Reynolds
Distinguished Professor / Claire Trevor Professor
Performance Activism Worldwide, Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Critical Theory, Transversal Poetics, Feminist Theory, Performance Theory, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, Extreme Sports
Doctoral Studies
Ph.D. and M.A. Harvard University; B.A. University of California, Berkeley
Bryan Reynolds is a scholar, playwright, director, performer, and cofounder and Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company. His research spans multiple disciplines, including critical theory, history, performance studies, social semiotics, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, sports studies, dramatic literature, and Global South studies. His work focuses on the experience, articulation, and performance of consciousness, subjectivity, affects, and sociocultural formations, particularly the ideologies, politics, passions, and geographies that define them, both on and off the stage.
Reynolds is the author of numerous books, including Excess & Joy: Philosophical Transversations (2022); The Transversality of Gregory de la Haba: The Future of Art & Myth are Upon Us (2022); Intermedial Theater: Performance Philosophy, Transversal Poetics, and the Future of Affect (2017); Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009); Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006); Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003); and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002). He is also editor or co-editor of volumes such as Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts, and Theories (2015), The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies (2009, 2014), Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). His scholarship and plays can be found on Academia.edu.
Current book projects include, as co-author with Mark LeVine, Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (forthcoming, UC Press, 2025); as author, Extreme Sports Performance: Toward a Performance Philosophy and Aesthetics; and as co-editor, with Mark LeVine, Theater of Immediacy: Social Change and Revolutionary Performance in the Middle East and Africa.
As a playwright and director, Reynolds’ works—produced by Transversal Theater or other organizations—have been performed in more than 70 venues across 19 countries on four continents. His plays include Unbuckled, Woof, Daddy, Railroad, Blue Shade, Lumping in Fargo, Eve's Rapture, The Green Knight, Nabi Saleh, Fractalicious!, No Erasure, Curie, Curie, Interview the Dead, After Images, or Marie Curie Remembers, The Passage, and LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience (written with Jon McKenzie and Saviana Stănescu).
Reynolds holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
More about his work can be found:
bryanreynolds.com
transversaltheater.com
