Bryan Reynolds

Reynolds' research spans several disciplines, including critical theory, history, performance studies, social semiotics, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, sports studies, dramatic literature, performance activism, and Global South studies. It focuses on the experience, articulation, and performance of consciousness, subjectivity, affect, and sociocultural formations, particularly the ideologies, politics, passions, and geographies that define them, both on and off the stage.

His books include, as author, 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); Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002); and as editor or co-editor, Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts, and Theories (2015); The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Vol. 2 (2014); The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive; Critical Responses to Kiran Desai (2009); Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005); and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). Other publications by Reynolds can be found on Academia.edu.

Books in progress include, as co-author, with Mark LeVine, Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (forthcoming from UC Press 2026); as author, Extreme Sports Performance: Toward a Performance Philosophy and Aesthetics (forthcoming from Routledge Press); as co-editor, with Mark LeVine, Theater of Immediacy: Social Change and Revolutionary Performance.

Reynolds is also a playwright, director, performer, and cofounder and Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company. Produced by Transversal Theater or other organizations, Reynolds plays, theater, and dance-theater works have been performed in over 75 venues in 22 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; LifeLines: Blavatsky Freud Experience (written with Jon McKenzie & Saviana Stănescu). Some of his plays can be found on Academia.edu, but better to write to him directly for copies because he often revises them.

B.A. University of California, Berkeley (1989);
M.A. and Ph.D. Harvard University (1991; 1997).