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Performing Phrenology: The Theatrical Roots of a 19th-Century Science is an exciting interdisciplinary project that brings together two seemingly unlike fields: science and theatre. Using a combination of archival, theory-based, and performance-based research methods, Performing Phrenology investigates interactions between key scientists and theatre professionals from the 19th century, to uncover the ways in which these two disciplines contributed to the development of phrenology-one of the most popular (and troubling) pseudoscientific fields of the 19th century.

In its focus on phrenology’s performance history, this project remains attentive to the field’s damaging legacy, most obviously its founders’ aggressive quest for “unique” and “distinctive” human remains to add to their collections and the way these remains were then used by white, Anglo-American lecturers to prop up hierarchies of race, gender, class, and ability. Like many other nineteenth-century sciences, phrenology benefited from and enhanced white supremacist goals and ideals, spreading racist ideas about human difference that linger today. By exploring the entanglement of phrenology and theatre, this project offers further evidence of theatre’s structural complicity with the performance and perpetuation of scientific racism and in so doing, challenges theatre historians to consider where and how they might revise dominant historical narratives and support twenty-first century repatriation efforts.