Esmé Louise James

Esmé Louise James (born 6 January 1997) is a British-born Australian sex historian, author, journalist, and TikTok user known for Kinky History, an online educational video and podcast series about the history of human sexuality, as well as a non-fiction book of the same name, released in Australia and New Zealand in October 2023. The World English-language rights were sold to TarcherPerigee and published in the US in June 2024. The rights for the Dutch translation were sold to Boeklyn BV (Vilvoorde, Belgium

James has written for outlets including Archer, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation, being nominated for a Walkley Award for her work with the latter. James is based in Melbourne, Australia.

Career Online Since joining TikTok in 2020, James has acquired around 2.5 million followers on the platform as of February 2023. She created the series in 2020, having seen a university friend's art history TikTok series and wanting to discuss the research she had done for her PhD thesis. The series quickly gained traction, with the second video in the series exceeding 1 million views within a day. By September 2022, she was ranked in the top 1 percent of global TikTok creators, based on metrics of likes, shares, comments, and total view counts. Later in the year, she was nominated at the 12th AACTA Awards for an Audience Choice Award for Best Digital Creator. She was nominated again at the 14th AACTA Awards.

In 2023, James launched a podcast version of Kinky History, produced via DM Podcasts. She has also appeared on podcasts including Jim Jefferies' I Don't Know About That and Triple J's The Hookup.

Writing As a teenager, James self-published several novels before writing the novella Honeyflower and Pansy in 2012, which was initially picked up by US publisher Astrea Press, who signed the 17-year-old James to a five-year contract. Her articles, poems, and short stories have appeared in the student publications Farrago, Lot's Wife, Judy's Punch, and Rabelais, and in media outlets Archer, Hecate, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation. For her work with the latter, she and editor Patrick Lenton were jointly nominated for a 2022 Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Education and personal life James completed her PhD in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communication in 2024. Her PhD thesis focused on the history of pornography and literary eroticism from the 1700s to the early 1900s. Her academic focus was initially on the history of religion before shifting to sexuality. and attended Beaconhills College. She is the daughter of Susan James, an outreach fellow at the University of Melbourne's school of mathematics and statistics; the two have collaborated on Kinky History and SexTistics. She and her boyfriend, Nicolas Muniz-Saavedra, began dating shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown. She is bisexual, having come out at the end of her undergraduate studies. and spoke at another one in 2022, held after the apparent overturn of Roe v. Wade in America. In 2024, Esmé founded the Let's Get Explicit campaign, which provoked conversation about violence against women in Australia.