PETA TAIT is a playwright and a professor at La Trobe University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has written and collaborated on 10 theatre and performance scripts and authored and co-edited 12 books. Her co-written play Mesmerized, with Matra Robertson about Charcot and his patient, the hysteric Augustine, is recently published in English and Portuguese translation, Retrato de Augustine (Praxila 2024). Eleanor and Mary Alice (Currency Press 2018) about Eleanor Roosevelt’s meeting with Mary Alice Evatt was staged to mark the 70-year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Other recent plays include: Green Time and Tempo about climate change (2023 playreading); Becalmed about religious child abuse (Shortlisted 2022 Rodney Seaborn Award); Tree Bones about natural ecologies produced in the 2019 UNESCO Cities of Literature Short Play Festival (Australian Plays Transform). A graduate of the NIDA Playwrights’ Studio, Peta worked with the Sydney-based award-winning The Party Line during the 1990s on Australia Council funded productions. Peta’s recent books include: the authored Forms of Emotion: Human to Nonhuman (Routledge 2022); authored Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion (Bloomsbury 2021); the co-edited Feminist Ecologies (2018); the authored Fighting Nature (2016); and authored Circus Bodies (Routledge 2005).