Emily Johnson
BA (2007)
Assistant Professor of History, Women's and Gender Studies, and African American Studies (Ball State University), and Director of the Muncie LGBTQ+ Oral History Project
Bio: Emily Suzanne Johnson (she/her) graduated from the University of Alberta in 2007 with a double major in History and Women's Studies (as it was then called). In 2015, she completed her Ph.D. from Yale University (in History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies). During the final year of her Ph.D. program, she also completed a year-long residential fellowship at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Emily's first book, This Is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. It explores the roles that nationally prominent women played in building and shaping the modern conservative Christian movement in the United States, from the 1970s to the present day. She is currently working on her second book, which will look at various "satanic panics" in the English-speaking world, from concerns about Ouija boards in the early twentieth century to the Q-Anon conspiracy theory in the early twenty-first century. She is especially interested in examining how these moral panics expressed broader concerns about gender, sexuality, and race.
Emily is now an Assistant Professor of History, Women's and Gender Studies, and African American Studies at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is also the director of the Muncie LGBTQ+ Oral History Project, which is working to preserve the history of queer communities in this mid-sized Midwestern city. Her work has been published in scholarly and popular venues, including The Washington Post.