Emma's dissertation is a history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, with a particular focus on New York and San Francisco, from 1980 to the present. She is tracing the experiences of HIV+ people from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and sexual identities who used diverse activist sites and mediums to resist the epidemic. She is particularly interested in tying HIV/AIDS activism and history to the development of feminism over the course of the twentieth century, and its intersection with the histories of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and the mobilisations for social justice. Emma holds an MSt in US History from the University of Oxford and a BA in History from UCL.
Her DPhil is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council with Pembroke College, Oxford, and she has received a number of awards to support her research trips to the United States.