Associate Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies Vivian Appler is a scholar/artist with areas of expertise in the science performance, feminist performance, practice-as-research (PaR), devised theatre, and puppetry. She is co-editor of the edited collection, Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance: Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets (2022) as well as its forthcoming sister volume, From the Curious to the Quantum (2023). Together, the collection of essays, interviews, and creative works proposes the science performance as a holistic model of cultural production that values multiple creative and critical domains while challenging traditional disciplinary hierarchies and social barriers. Her monograph, “Always Forwards, Never Backwards”: Spectacle, Suffrage, and Science in the United States, 1865-1920, is an interrogation of public performances of astronomy at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring intersections of gender and race, theatre and science, education and access in social and professional cultures. Other scholarly writing has been published in PARtake,Global Performance Studies, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Comparative Drama, and the Routledge Guide to Jacques Lecoq. She is a former fellow of the Huntington Library and Fulbright International. Her devised and PaR projects encounter questions pertaining to S.T.E.A.M., access, and equity. With The Well Theatre Company, she is collaborating on The Mouse and the Buddha, a multi-media performance that asks questions about mindfulness in children. Full-length devised works about science include Particle Play: A Romance for Quarks, Strings, and Other Things and the solo show, In the Still of the Night: Andromeda’s Dark Stuff, which premiered in 2013. Her research has been supported with grants from NASA’s SC Space Consortium, the South Carolina Arts Commission, SC Humanities, and other organizations.
