About

Emma Jo Esposito is a queer public historian and digital archivist specializing in marginalized histories in the Ohio River Valley. They are passionate about using the historical record as an activist tool for social justice, cultural healing, and community building. Their writing has been featured in Ohio Valley History , Queer Kentucky, and the National Council on Public History’s History@Work blog.

Esposito first fell in love with archival work in 2018 as an undergraduate student at the University of Louisville, as part of the Office of the Provost’s Summer Research Opportunity Program. With Dr. Lara Kelland, Emma Jo researched and formed a database of over two hundred sites of LGBTQ+ historical significance across the state of Kentucky, combing through over 15,000 artifacts in the Williams-Nichols Collection at the University of Louisville’s Archives & Special Collections. The Kentucky Queer History Project and further independent study greatly informed their love of digital public history, grassroots LGBTQ initiatives, and ArcGIS mapping. This research later informed their senior honors thesis, “Land Lines: Modes of Communication in Kentucky’s Queer Past and Present,” which won the Anne Braden Institute Social Justice Research Paper Award and the Best College Honors Thesis for the Social Sciences Division for UofL’s Class of 2021.

Esposito went on to work in a variety of historical institutions from corporate archives and museums to private historical societies and university libraries. Emma Jo was first hired as a digitization intern at the Filson Historical Society in January 2020, and created the digital exhibit “I Scream America: The History of Enslaved People at Oxmoor Plantation” for which they were awarded the Kentucky Historical Society’s Public History Intern of the Year Award in 2022. They were later promoted to Collections Assistant, where they accessioned and catalogued photograph and manuscript collections and administered materials to researchers in the reading room.

Today, Esposito is a dual-master’s student and University Fellow at Indiana University-Indianapolis. They’re projected to graduate with their MLIS in May 2027, with a concentration in digital curation, and their MA in Public History in May 2028. They currently work as Digitization Specialist at the Indiana Historical Society, where they process scan orders, digitize all archival formats, and get lost in heaps of glorious metadata.