Jean Halley

Jean Halley (Professor of Sociology) teaches at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She earned her doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and her master’s degree in theology at Harvard University. Her book about touching children, breastfeeding, children’s sleep, gender and heteronormativity, Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy was published in 2007. She also assisted Patricia Ticineto Clough in editing The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), and co-authored with Amy Eshleman and Ramya Vijaya, Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race (2011; second edition 2022). Her book, The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets, a combination of memoir and social history of cattle ranching in the United States, came out in 2012. She and Amy Eshleman published Seeing Straight: An Introduction to Gender and Sexual Privilege on gender and heteronormativity in 2017. Halley’s book, Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses, came out with University of Georgia Press in 2019. Finally, co-authored with Ron Nerio The Roads to Hillbrow: Making Life in South Africa’s Community of Migrants came out with Fordham University Press in 2022. Halley and her horse, Snipaway, grew up in the rural Rocky Mountains. She now lives in New York City with a couple of humans, one pitbull and one vicious chihuahua.