Dr. Mark Evans Bryan Affiliation: Faculty Title: Associate Professor Office: Theatre Room 6 Email: bryanm@denison.edu Phone: 740-587-6260 Fax: 740-587-5755 Ph.D. from The Ohio State University

Ph.D. History, literature, and criticism of the theatre, The Ohio State University.

A.M. Interdisciplinary program in the humanities (MAPH), The University of Chicago.

B.A. English literature and theatre, Denison University.

Mark Evans Bryan is an historian of theatre and culture in the U.S. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of the representations of rurality and outland cultures in popular art. His scholarly work includes “‘Crusade of Conquest’: Orientalist Surrogations in Manifest-Destinarian Theatre,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 21.1; “American Drama, 1900-1915,” Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama (2005); and “The Rhetoric of Race and Slavery in an American Patriot Drama: John Leacock’s The Fall of British Tyranny,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 12.3. His article, “‘Slideing into Monarchical extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford, Jr.,” is forthcoming in the January 2010 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly and his article, “Yeoman and Barbarians: Popular Outland Caricature and American Identity,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Culture.

An artist as well, Bryan’s play, Mercury Seven with Signs Following, in full or in part, has been produced in the United States, Hungary, New Zealand, India, and Chinese Taipei, and published in the Kenyon Review (part one, “Middle True,” appears in the Winter 2004 issue). As an actor, Bryan was recently featured in a national “branded entertainment” internet commercial for Verizon Broadband and appeared in the short film, Gasoline (2007), written and directed by Andrew M. Hulse. Gasoline has won multiple awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Audience Choice Award at N.Y.U.’s 2008 Manoogian screenings at the Directors’ Guild in L.A. Bryan also worked as a cameraman on portions of Hulse’s documentary, Gibson Girls, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in 2005. He is both an alumnus company member and the faculty advisor of Denison’s Burpee’s Seedy Theatrical Company, an improvisational performance group, founded in 1979, purportedly the oldest of its kind on American university campuses; B.S.T.C. counts among its alums numerous theatre, television and film actors and writers, including Steve Carell.

Bryan is currently at work on a book project on the Bradford family of eighteenth-century Philadelphia and popular culture in the middle colonies between 1755 and 1795. Recent artistic projects include writing and developing a feature screenplay for Hulse’s County Line Films; adapting and directing the “contrivance,” Cato at the Bakehouse near Headquarters, in Denison’s 2008-09 mainstage season; and work on his current playwriting project, a solo piece on desire and the aging body, a version of which will premiere in April 2010 at the “Gender, Bodies, Technology” conference in Roanoke, Virginia.