Presented by the University of Melbourne as part of the CERSH Sexual Wellness Professional Development Series 2024 –
Esmé Louise James (@esme.louisee) is best known for her series Kinky History which has amassed over 3.5 million followers across her social media accounts. Esmé is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne; her thesis traces an aesthetic of the erotic across eighteenth-century literature. She has produced a range of non-fiction articles for publications such as the Age, the ABC and the Conversation. In 2020, she was listed in the Top 30 Emerging Writers by SBS Australia. Esmé’s book Kinky History: The Stories of Our Intimate Lives, Past and Present was published by Pantera Press in Australia in 2023, and TarcherPerigee worldwide, in 2024.
Esmé presents the popular Kinky History podcast, which charted to #1 History Podcast in Australia. In 2022, Esmé gave talk at TEDxSydney entitled “Writing kinky sex back into the history pages.” Esmé was the recipient of Screen Australia’s Every Voice initiative funding her TikTok series, SexTistics, alongside Dr Susan James. In recognition of her groundbreaking education online, Esmé was nominated for Best Digital Creator at the 2022 AACTA Awards. In 2023, she was the recipient of the University of Melbourne’s Rising Star Alumni Award and nominated for AimCo’s Influence for Good Award.
Dr Susan James is an Outreach Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. Susan has a Master of Arts in Pure Mathematics from Cambridge University, UK and then a Master of Science and a PhD in Medical Statistics from the University of Leicester, UK. Susan is passionate about bringing the joys of Mathematics and Statistics to students of all ages. She spent many years teaching secondary students in both the UK and in Australia. Recently she spent five years traveling all over Australia running the AMSI (Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute) national CHOOSEMATHS Careers and Awards champaign which had a particular focus on encouraging girls to believe in themselves and persevere with their mathematics. Susan was the joint recipient of Screen Australia’s 2021 Every Voice Initiative and co-author of Kinky History.
