Graduate Student
Cassie Archer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her MA in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies from UCSB in 2023 and her BA in Theatre and English from Chapman University in 2020. Cassie’s area of study is theatre and drama in the US, with particular attention to feminist theatre and women’s contributions, history plays, adaptation, and dramaturgy. Her dissertation seeks to trace the changing shape of history plays in the last forty years in the US, demonstrating how the evolving dramaturgies make visible systems of history production that have contributed to the construction of an “American” identity based on a mythic past, and the omission of stories that do not fit into that mythic past. Further, the dramaturgical innovations prompt a reconsideration of theatre as a legitimate and powerful apparatus for history production.
Cassie is also an experienced dramaturg. Her dramaturgy credits include LAUNCH PAD’s Winter 2023 Preview Production of She Wolf, Margaret of Anjou, the 2022 LAUNCH PAD Summer Reading Series, and the Fall 2021 production of Seagull. At Chapman University, she served as the dramaturg for Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Lysistrata, and Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the vibrator play. Additionally, she was the dramaturgy intern for Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in 2019.