ABOUT

​Aria S. Halliday, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Halliday specializes in the study of cultural constructions of black girlhood and womanhood in material, visual, and digital culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She engages broad interdisciplinary interests in girlhood, Black feminism, and performance in Black popular culture in the United States and the Caribbean. Her research is featured in Cultural Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Girlhood Studies, Palimpsest, and SOULS. Her article, "Twerk Sumn!: Theorizing Black Girl Epistemology in the Body" won the 2021 Stuart Hall Foundation x Cultural Studies Award.

BOOKS

Buy Black
How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture

“Buy Black offers an important and well-argued consideration of the Black women cultural producers who, in an effort to subvert a misogynoiristic system, sometimes traffic in the very stereotypical practices they wish to upend. Halliday’s concept of ‘embodied objectification’ helps to make clear our own investments in consumer capitalism and prompts us to be more circumspect about our participation as a means to some ultimately unsatisfying end.”
—Dr. Moya Bailey, author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance

"In focusing on Black women as culture-makers, the book provides a uniquely important view as to the ways that Black women's ingenuity and entrepreneurship have been largely overlooked in understanding these questions. I was consistently impressed with the author's ability to cast a wide net that moves across many topics, while keeping it all held together so that the shape and fit seem right."
—Dr. Elizabeth Chin, author of My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries

The Black Girlhood Studies Collection

“The field of Black Girlhood Studies deserves a book this beautiful, this powerful, and this affirming. Halliday has put together a collection of works that truly loves Black girls. Each chapter is unique and interdisciplinary. It asks us to explore how we understand Black girlhood today. Don’t just read this book: deeply study it. The collective knowledge within these pages will push the field and our communities for years to come.”
—Dr. Bettina L. Love, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, and author of We Want to Do More Than Survive and Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak

“This collection, expertly edited by the emerging and ambitious scholar Aria Halliday, is both an inoculation and an antidote, as well as a testament to the exponential power of Black Girlhood Studies. The text is a savvy reframing of the too-often denied legibility of Black girls’ worthiness—their need for protection, play, security, imagination, and prevention from harm. This volume is its own world-making of the past, present, and future, reshaping the context in which Black girls can finally shine.”
—Dr. Kyra D. Gaunt, University at Albany, SUNY, and author of the prize-winning book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

​“This groundbreaking collection brings together some of the most brilliant emerging and leading scholars in Black Girlhood Studies. Offering both intellectually rigorous and deeply affective insights, this collection shows us why we need Black Girlhood Studies and how to do it well. This is the collection Black girls deserve.”
—Dr. Treva Lindsey, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, and author of Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

Scholar.

Teacher.

Cultural Theorist.
Teaching is an opportunity
to embrace new ideas,
create innovative assignments,
and challenge myself
& my students.

-Dr. Halliday