This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Aria Halliday, who teaches in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American and Africana Studies at University of Kentucky. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of two books: Black Girls and How We Fail Them (2025) and Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed U.S. Pop Culture (2022), as well as the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019). In this conversation, we discuss the place of gender studies and historical experience in the study of Black life, the ethics and politics of the field, and how Black Studies sensibilities change the nature of research and pedagogy.