MAPS: Panel Discussion — "Erotic Cities and Queer Suburbs"

This event is held on behalf of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Sociology. The featured speakers are Dr. Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California (USC), and Dr. Josh Sides, Whitsett Professor of California History at California State University, Northridge.

Dr. Karen Tongson joined the USC faculty in English and Gender Studies in fall 2005. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to USC, Tongson held a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego, and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Residential Research Fellowship at UC Irvine. Tongson’s work on popular culture, queer studies, performance, music, and literature has appeared in such journals as Social Text, GLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The International Journal of Communication. Her work has appeared in the following anthologies as well: Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge) and The Blackwell Companion to LGBTQ Studies (eds. Haggerty and McGarry). Her first book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, was published August 1^st, 2011, as part of the New York University Press Sexual Cultures Series.

Dr. Josh Sides joined the Department of History CSUN in 2005 as the second Whitsett Professor of California History. He was appointed as the Director of the Center for Southern California Studies in 2007. At CSUN, he teaches classes on urban history, the West, African Americans, and California. He has published numerous articles and the books: L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The latter won the Bullough Prize for Best Book of 2009 by the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality as well as the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. He is the editor of a forthcoming anthology entitled Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles.

For more information, please contact Jake Alimahomed-Wilson (jbwilson@csulb.edu) or visit www.csulb.edu/cla/maps.