Emma Howell was a young woman attending the University of Nebraska when she fell in love with Wilbur Knight, a mining engineer working in the Medicine Bow Range of Wyoming. They married on October 16, 1889.
In time, they moved to Laramie where Wilbur taught mining engineering and metallurgy at the University of Wyoming while Emma became active as a professor’s wife in Laramie society. When her husband died unexpectedly in 1903, Knight was left to support their four children. She did so by getting elected to the position of Albany Superintendent of Schools in 1904. In 1911, she completed her BA in the same class as her daughter Wilburta.
Moving up the ranks in the educational system, Knight was appointed the advisor to women and assistant head of home economics at the University of Wyoming in 1911, then as an assistant professor in 1913. In 1918, she became the University of Wyoming’s first full-time dean of women, a post that she held until her retirement in 1920.
In her honor, the University of Wyoming named the new women’s dormitory – Knight Hall — in her honor in 1941.