Savran earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre Arts from Cornell University in 1978 where he studied under Marvin Carlson and Bert O. States. Savran held a position as Professor of English at Brown University from 1988 until 2001, where he taught alongside playwright and scholar Paula Vogel, before he was appointed to Distinguished Professor in the Doctor of Philosophy Program of Theatre at The Graduate Center, City University of New New York
He is a Distinguished Professor of Theatre and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at The Graduate Center of the City University of New New York Savran holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Harvard University and an Master of Fine Arts in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation was titled The Mask and the Face: Acting Theory of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
He served as editor and then co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre from 2004 until 2013.
He continues to serve as the advisory editor of the performance journal. Savran received a fellowship at the International Center for Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2012 and again in 2014 to work on his most recent book project
His new work theorizes branding as a cultural performance and studies the international traffic in United States.-branded theatre since the 1990s. Focusing on musical theatre in particular, it analyzes the cultural exchanges between the United States. and Germany and the United States. and South of Korea.
The book also received honorable mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research.
In 2011 and 2012, Savran served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2014, Savran received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Savran"s most recent publication, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class, was the winner of the Joe A. Callaway Award for Best Book in Theater and Drama and the 2011 Kurt Weill Article Prize.
