On Thursday September 25th, AAAS Assistant Professor, Ashley  L. Smith-Purviance will be one of three featured speakers on the Black Girlhood Roundtable Virtual Event.  Please read below and check out the attachment for the QR code on how to join.     

Join the Black Girlhood Roundtable virtual event featuring speakers Dr. Aria S. Halliday, Dr. Therí A. Pickens, and Dr. Ashley L. Smith-Purviance on Thursday, September 25th at 1pm EST. Please fill out the form to register at bit.ly/BGRoundtable. After submission, you will receive a confirmation email with the webinar link. 

About the roundtable speakers: 

Dr. Aria S. Halliday is the Marie Rich Endowed Professor in the department of Gender and Women’s Studies and program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She has authored and edited numerous publications, including the 2021 Cultural Studies x Stuart Hall Foundation award-winning article “Twerk Sumn!: Theorizing Black Girl Epistemology in the Body,” The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019), Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (2022), and Black Girls and How We Fail Them (2025). 

Dr. Therí A. Pickens is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College. She has written two books: New Body Politics and Black Madness :: Mad Blackness. She is also the editor of several projects including two special issues of academic journals dedicated to Blackness and Disability and one volume about Arab American Aesthetics. She is also a poet, whose debut collection, What Had Happened Was, was published by Duke UP in 2025. 

Dr. Ashley L. Smith-Purviance is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She has a forthcoming book titled (Un)Schooling Black Girls: Navigating Suburbia, Anti-Black-Girl Violence & Mechanisms of School Survival. Her work has also been featured in Feminist Studies, Girlhood Studies, The Journal of Negro Education, and The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019). She also curates a digital humanities project, The Rolling Archives of Black Girlhood (2023).