Aria S. Halliday, Ph.D. is Associate 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 cultural constructions of black girlhood and womanhood in material, visual, and digital culture in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Her interdisciplinary interests include sexuality, Black feminism, and radicalism in Black popular culture in the United States and the Caribbean. She is the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (Women’s Press, 2019) and co-editor of volume 7 of the Journal of Hip Hop Studies on hip-hop feminism (2020). Her articles and chapters have been published in Cultural Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Girlhood Studies, Palimpsest, and SOULS, as well as in edited volumes such as Against A Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Girls' Studies. Her most recent book, Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture was published in 2022 (University of Illinois Press).

Dr. Halliday has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the Institute for Citizens and Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty (2020-2021) and the University of Texas Austin Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellowship (2022-2023). Her article, "Twerk Sumn!: Theorizing Black Girl Epistemology in the Body," won the 2021 Stuart Hall Foundation x Cultural Studies Award.

Dr. Halliday served as chair of the Girls’ and Girls Studies Caucus at the National Women’s Studies Association 2016-2022. She is co-founder of Digital Black Girls, a digital humanities archive celebrating Black girls' cultural production and innovation. She regularly engages in public scholarship through editorials and podcast interviews, as well as service as a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.