Halley was born in 1967, in Washington D. C. and grew up in Wyoming and Montana. She attended Colorado College and received her bachelor's degree in psychology, with minors in Spanish and women's studies , in 1989. She earned her master's degree in theology at Harvard University in 1992 and her doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2003.

Halley frequently uses elements of memoir in relating the topics of her books to her own biography. Her book about touching children, breastfeeding, children's sleep and contemporary childrearing advice, Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy was published in July 2007 by the University of Illinois Press. Her second book The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social was published in 2007. She co-edited the book with Patricia Ticineto Clough. In Wire her autoethnographic piece in that volume, Halley challenges traditional modes of story telling that develop in linear fashion and that use binary oppositions as a way of describing or knowing the world.

In 2011, she co-authored Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race with Amy Eshleman and Ramya Vijaya. Her fourth book The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets was published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan. In this book Halley weaved together a social history of the American beef cattle industry, with her memoir of growing up in Wyoming in the Shadow of her grandfather's cattle Business.

Halley has co-authored her fifth book, Seeing Straight: An Introduction to Sexual and Gender Privilege, with Amy Eshelman. The book was published in 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield.