Rate My Professor Mark Bayer

Mark Bayer, Ph.D., serves as Department Chair and Celia Jacobs Endowed Professor in British Literature in the Department of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Ohio State University (2002), with a dissertation titled “The Queen Anne's Men and the Commercial Life of London’s Neighborhood Economies”; an M.A. in English Literature from McGill University (1997), with a thesis on “Changing of the Guards: Theories of Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s Richard II”; and a B.A. (Honors) in Political Studies from Queen’s University (1995). Bayer joined UTSA in 2008 as Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013 and Professor in 2023, and has held Department Chair positions from 2013–2019 and Interim Chair since 2021. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut from 2003 to 2008.

Bayer specializes in early modern English literature, especially drama and Shakespeare, with research interests encompassing literary theory, British Romanticism, Renaissance poetry, and the reception of early modern drama in contexts from Jacobean London to the Middle East and nineteenth-century America. His monograph, Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London (University of Iowa Press, 2011), argues that playhouses fostered social capital and community formation, earning finalist status for the George Freedley Memorial Award. He co-edited Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States (Routledge, 2022) and has an edited volume, Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Tradition, under contract with Cornell University Press. Key publications include “Henry Norman Hudson and the Origins of American Shakespeare Studies” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 2017), “The Balfour Declaration As a Pound of Flesh” (Shakespeare, 2020), “Twelfth Night and the Economics of Christian Charity” (Reformation, 2023), and “Constructing Inessential Shakespeare in the United States” (Shakespeare, 2024). He has guest-edited issues of Multicultural Shakespeare (2023) and Borrowers and Lenders (2010). Bayer’s honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2006), fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, Newberry Library, and Renaissance Society of America, and various UTSA grants. His scholarship illuminates Shakespeare’s enduring cultural authority and theatrical afterlives.