He then earned an interdisciplinary Doctor of Philosophy degree in classics, history, and religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a doctoral dissertation titled Saint Peter of Alexandria: Bishop and Martyr in 1985 under the direction of Birger A. Pearson.
He won the Faculty Scholarship & Creative Activity award at California State University, Bakersfield, in 2007/2008.
On April 26, 2018, Vivian was granted professor emeritus status at California State University, Bakersfield.
He is the recipient of the 2015 Nelson R. Burr Prize of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church (HSEC) for his article “Wake the Devil from His Dream: Thomas Dudley, Quincy Ewing, Religion, and the ‘Race Problem’ in the Jim Crow South” published in the December 2014 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History.
[7] Vivian is also a published poet with published collections including Other Voices, Other Rooms (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2020), Poems Written in a Time of Plague: Further Reflections on Scripture (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2020), and A Doorway into Thanks: Further Reflections on Scripture (New York: Austin Macauley, 2023).