Mike Vanden Heuvel

Mike joined the University 1996. He teaches courses in dramatic literature (primarily British, American, and Continental), dramatic criticism, and theatre and performance theory ranging from Shakespeare to the European avant-garde and postdramatic theatre. He is an affiliate faculty member in several areas (Integrated Liberal Studies; Visual Cultures; Celtic Studies; Center for European Studies), and currently chairs the ILS Program. Mike is also an active contributor to International Studies and the UW Study Abroad program, having developed programs and taught in London, Dublin and Florence.

He is author of Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text (U Michigan) and Elmer Rice: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Greenwood), as well as essays on theatre pedagogy, dramatic literature, and dramatic theory that have appeared in Theatre Journal, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and New Theatre Quarterly, among others. He is currently at work on Decades of American Playwriting: The 1970s for Methuen, and will follow that with an edited book on American theatre companies post-1970.

Current research interests focus on interdisciplinary studies of theatre and science, a field in which he has published extensively. He is collecting these essays for a volume devoted to theatre and science and tentatively entitled “‘Congregations Rich with Entropy’: Performance and the Emergence of Complexity.”

Mike holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison (English and Comparative Literature); M.A. from the University of Chicago (English); and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Madison (English).