Dr. Esmé Louise James is at the forefront of the Australian academic and creative industries. Her PhD, completed in 2024 at the University of Melbourne, traced an aesthetic of the erotic across eighteenth-century literature.

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With a combined following of over 3.5 million people across social platforms, Esmé is trailblazing a future of  edu-tainment. She has received two nominations for Best Digital Creator at the AACTA Awards, and was awarded Media Weeks Best Digital Talent in 2024. She's a TEDx speaker (Writing kinky sex back into the history pages), appears in the Top 30 Emerging Writers list (SBS), is the winner of the Rising Star Alumni Award (University of Melbourne) and recipient of Screen Australia’s Every Voice initiative.

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Esmé's debut book, Kinky History: The Stories of Our Intimate Lives, Past and Present was published in Australia in 2023 by Pantera Press, and made available worldwide in 2024 by Tarcher Perigree. The first translated edition hit shelves in 2025. 

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Sharing her knowledge, she has produced a range of non-fiction articles for The Age, the ABC and the Conversation, content for brands like Netflix, Amazon and Wicked The Musical as well as short stories and poetry, for publications such as Hardie Grant, Press and Archer.

 

Brought to you by Screen Australia, her short-form series SexTistics sees Esmé and her mum, Dr Susan James, dive into the statistics of sex to create a snapshot of the past and present. By asking the big questions, audiences discover which generation was the friskiest, if people tell the truth about their sex lives and if we are as open about sex as we'd like to think.

 

Always a staunch advocate for women, Esmé created 'Let's Get Explicit' in 2024. An initiative inspired by 'Calendar Girls', the project includes some of the country's most prominent and influential voices speaking out about the growing epidemic of violence against women: "We’re flipping the narrative on what is considered explicit. It’s not women using their minds and bodies of their own volition - it’s what happens when that control is taken away". The initiative calls for practical action while turning up the national conversation on the topic. The initiative features some of the country's most prominent voices and is raising much-needed funds.

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