Roberta Barker is Professor of Theatre in the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000: The Destined Livery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage (University of Iowa Press, 2022), the co-editor with Kim Solga of New Essays in Canadian Theatre: New Canadian Realisms and New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2013), and the editor of a number of editions of early modern plays. Her current projects include a new edition of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for Cambridge University Press and a biography of the early modern boy actress Richard Robinson. Among her credits as a director of theatre and opera are Orfeo ed Euridice, The Rake’s Progress, Luisa Miller, Aunt Helen, and Così Fan Tutte (Opera Nova Scotia); Troilus and Cressida, Fuente Ovejuna, The Witch of Edmonton, The Mill on the Floss, She Herself is a Haunted House, Drums and Organs, and The Dog in the Manger (Dal Theatre); and The Cunning Little Vixen (Dal Opera). She is the librettist for a new opera by composer Tawnie Olson, Sanctuary and Storm, which received the National Opera Association of America’s Dominick Argento Prize for Best Chamber Opera, 2021-23, and which will receive its professional premiere, co-produced by Vancouver Opera and Re:Naissance Opera, in November 2023.