Hayley O’Malley is a film and literary historian, and her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on African American film and literature, feminist thought, and political activism through the arts, with a particular emphasis on Black women’s writing and filmmaking since the 1960s. She is also interested in the history and practice of the public humanities, and she regularly curates public programming and film series at universities, film centers, and museums.

Professor O’Malley’s current book project, Dreams of a Black Cinema, which is under advanced contract with Princeton University Press, is an archivally-driven history of how Black women writers experimented with moving images and worked to build a new film culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. She is also working on several collaborative projects. With Samantha N. Sheppard and Alix Beeston, she is co-editing a volume of previously unpublished plays and screenplays by Kathleen Collins. And with Brittney Edmonds, she is co-editing a special issue of the journal African American Review entitled “Black Literature+: African American Literature in Dialogue with the Other Arts.” Professor O’Malley’s writing has been has been published in ASAP/J, Black Camera, Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, James Baldwin Review, and The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature, among other venues. Her recent curatorial work includes co-organizing the 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts in Chicago and “Out of the Archive: Envisioning Blackness,” a yearlong film series in Iowa City.

Professor O’Malley was recently named a 2024-25 scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Her research has also been supported by the Huntington Library, the Firestone Library at Princeton University, the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library at Emory University, among other institutions. Before coming to Rice, she taught in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa and was a postdoctoral fellow with the Black Arts Archive Sawyer Seminar at Northwestern University.