Dr. Josh Sides joined the Department of History at CSUN in Fall of 2005 as the second Whitsett Professor of California History. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1999, served as a Kevin Starr Fellow at the University of California Humanities Institute at Irvine in 2000-2001, and was an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly Pomona from 2001-2005.

He writes and teaches about the American urban experience with a particular focus on California. He is the author of numerous articles as well as the book, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). His second book, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco will be published by Oxford in Spring of 2009.

At CSUN, Dr. Sides teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of Los Angeles, San Francisco, California, the history of African Americans, and historical methods and theory.