Emma Johansen is a public historian, queer archivist, and activist-scholar from Louisville, Kentucky. They graduated summa cum laude from the University of Louisville in May 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in history and a minor in LGBTQ Studies. Their senior honors thesis, “Land Lines: Modes of Communication in Kentucky’s Queer Past and Present,” won the Best College Honors Thesis in the Social Sciences division, as well as the Anne Braden Institute Social Justice Research Paper Award. Emma Jo was also awarded the Mary K. Tachau award for best graduating history student for the class of 2021. They were nominated by their peers and faculty mentors for the Woodcock Award, an award considered by the University of Louisville to be the highest honor granted to an undergraduate student.
Emma Jo was born and raised in Louisville to a family of Italian immigrants, and is dedicated to documenting the rich queer history in their hometown and beyond. For over two years, Johansen worked as Collections Assistant at the Filson Historical Society, where they processed, catalogued, and exhibited incoming manuscripts and photographs. In their research, they’re inspired by queer place-making in the twentieth century, grassroots archives as sites of political activism, and social justice movements in the American South.
Emma Jo is now a dual graduate student at Indiana University Indianapolis, where they received a University Fellowship. They are currently working towards two master’s degrees: a Master of Arts in History, with a concentration in public history, and a Master of Library and Information Science, with a specialty in digital curation. As part of their University Fellowship, Johansen serves as the 2024-2025 Social Media Fellow and Graduate Assistant for the National Council on Public History (NCPH). They also work part-time for the Center for Digital Scholarship as a Wikipedia Specialist, a department of the IU Library system.
Emma Jo has extensive experience in digital humanist projects, including digital mapping, Omeka projects, and podcast creation. Their digital exhibits have been reported on WHAS-11’s “Great Day Live,” and their audio works have been featured on WXOX community radio. Several of their projects have been funded by the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society, the Kentucky Historical Society, and the Summer Research Opportunity Program. Their work researching enslaved people and genealogies in the Bullitt-Oxmoor Family Papers at the Filson Historical Society was recognized by the Kentucky Historical Society with the “Public History Intern of the Year” Award in 2022.
You can find their resume below.
