Esmé James is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne in the School of Culture and Communications, researching the development of the erotic genre from the eighteenth century onwards. On social media she has developed her wildly popular Kinky History video series, which explores the history of human sexuality across a range of platforms (including TikTok, Instagram and YouTube) and the series SexTistics, which uses statistics to create a snapshot – past and present – of gender, sexuality and identity in Australia.

Esmé was a speaker at TEDxSydney in 2022, and her writing has been published in the Age, the ABC, The Conversation and the Herald Sun. In 2020, she was listed in the Top 30 Emerging Writers by SBS Australia. Esmé’s career goals include continuing to build her platform as an academic communicator using various forms of popular media to reach and educate a mainstream audience.