Since May 2018, Emma Johansen has been researching and digitally mapping LGBT heritage in Kentucky from before the 1900s to 2000. Using the Williams-Nichols Collection at the University of Louisville, Johansen has pinned almost 350 sites of LGBT significance state-wide. Through this research, we can interpret how LGBT heritage has persevered in the archives of urban areas, and agrarian gay life was more privatized and secluded. You can interact with the digital map and learn more about the project at kentuckyqueerhistory.org.
In the spring of 2019, Emma Johansen was a part of Dr. Lara Kelland’s and Dr. Cate Fosl’s project to capture the rich history racial and labor justice of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Johansen, along with graduate student Chad White, curated the Gender and Queer Organizing exhibit, located at the following link: http://radicalsouthernhistory.org/.
Johansen and many other scholars created “After the Shots” to accumulate resources for public historians in the wake of gun violence at the National Council of Public History 2019 Conference in Hartford, Connecticut. Johansen created the timeline of gun violence in America that can be seen on the Historical Interpretation page. You can learn more about the project at http://aftertheshots.org/.
From January to April 2020, Johansen and several classmates curated a digital exhibit on the Louisville League of Women Voters for Dr. Katherine Massoth’s Women’s History course. This exhibit acts in conversation with other institutions in the Louisville area, including the Frazier History Museum and the Filson Historical Society, that curated their own exhibits in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. This project was originally meant to be a physical exhibit housed in the University of Louisville’s Ekstrom Library, but the global COVID-19 pandemic necessitated an abrupt change in approach and methodology. The exhibit is now hosted by The University of Louisville’s Digital Humanities Collective, and the full project can be viewed here: https://thedigitalhumanitiescollective.com/womensactivismwomenshistory2020/.
In the summer and fall of 2020, Johansen completely digitized the Baptist Orphan Home Collection as a Digitization Intern at the Filson Historical Society, underneath the Associate Curator of Digital Projects, Danielle Spalenka. The digitization project was funded by a grant from the Kentucky Genealogical Society, and required extensive digitization, a robust tagging system, and thorough metadata creation. You can peruse the entire collection here: https://filsonhistorical.omeka.net/collections/show/60.
Throughout 2021, Johansen researched the legacy of enslaved people on the Oxmoor plantation in Louisville, Kentucky from the early settlement of the state to the early 20th century. Johansen investigated one of the largest manuscript collections at the Filson Historical Society, The Bullitt Family Papers, to find and digitize evidence of people who were enslaved by the Bullitt family on the Cottonwood and Oxmoor plantations. What begun as a pilot project, also funded by the Kentucky Genealogical Society, grew into a massive initiative for historical institutions in Louisville to reckon with the legacy of enslavement in their collections. This project required advanced digitization of fragile and oversized materials, an implementation of anti-racist description resources, and a re-imagining of archives as sites of generational trauma. Here, anti-racist metadata and the digital exhibition of these materials are used as a methods of restorative justice, and this project can be seen as a case study for other institutions hoping to rectify the hurt caused by previously neglecting or erasing the evidence of enslaved persons in their collections. More importantly, by remembering the people who were enslaved by the Bullitt family, this project can aid descendants in connecting with their previously hidden family lineage. To look through the digital collection, click here: https://filsonhistorical.omeka.net/collections/show/73.
Johansen created a companion digital exhibit to the Sanders-Bullitt Digital Collection, which was also powered through Omeka. This digital exhibit brings greater historical context to the Bullitt Family Papers, and the materials chosen for the digital collection. This digital exhibit highlights the families of those who were enslaved by the Bullitt family at the Oxmoor and Cottonwood plantations in Kentucky from the founding of the state to the late 1870s. After a brief history of the two plantations, this exhibit discusses the roles that gender, marriages, hemp house burnings, and self-emancipation played in subverting the institution of slavery. This exhibit reworks the Bullitt Family Papers-Oxmoor Collection, one of the Filson’s largest manuscript collections, to speak from the perspective of those in bondage, and to highlight their agency within enslavement. This project, combined with the digital collection, was recognized by the Kentucky Historical Society with a Kentucky History Award, recognizing Johansen as “Public History Intern of the Year” in 2022. You can view the digital exhibit here: https://filsonhistorical.omeka.net/exhibits/show/sanders-oxmoor.
