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.