About

Becky Nicolaides received her bachelor’s degree at USC in journalism and history, and her MA and PhD at Columbia University in American history, where she wrote her dissertation on her home city of Los Angeles.  

Her research focuses on the history of North American suburbanization. She helped pioneer a revisionist wave of historical scholarship in the 1990s that explored suburban diversity – the workers, the poor, the immigrants, and ethnic and racial groups who became suburbanites throughout the 20th century.  Her first book, the award-winning My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago 2002), told the story of blue-collar suburbanites in southeast Los Angeles and how their everyday lives shaped their political sensibilities. Her second book The Suburb Reader 1st and 2nd editions (Routledge, 2006/2016), co-edited with Andrew Wiese, is broad survey of North American suburban history with over 200 documents, essays, illustrations, and scholarly excerpts tracing how the suburbs started, how they got to where they are today, and some ideas for moving forward in more sustainable, equitable ways. Her latest book, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945  (Oxford, 2024), explores everyday life in our changing suburban world.  Becky has written for Time Magazine, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and academic publications.  

Becky has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Randoph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. She was also part of a transnational team of scholars that won a three-year EU Erasmus+ Programme Grant, devoted to the study of transnational suburbanism in the EU and US.  She was also lead member of a team awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities digital humanities grant for “The Los Angeles County Demographic Data Project, 1950-2010,” now online at the USC Digital Library. 

As a consultant, Becky has worked on numerous public history, film, and podcast projects. She wrote and co-wrote numerous historical studies for Survey LA, the LA Conservancy, the city of Los Angeles, and the state of California. She consulted on several film projects and podcasts. In 2020, she co-founded History Studio, a partnership of award-winning scholars providing expert research, script vetting, and original content for the entertainment industry.  She heads operations for History Studio.  

Becky has served on academic and editorial boards, including the Governing Council of the American Historical Association, an elected position, and as co-editor of the Historical Studies of Urban America book series for the University of Chicago Press. She was a subcommittee co-chair for Mayor Eric Garcetti's L.A. Civic Memory Working Group, and she currently co-chairs the Local Arrangements Committee for the upcoming conference of the Urban History Association in Los Angeles, October 2025.  

Becky has taught and mentored numerous students and scholars.  She held professorships at UC San Diego (where she was tenured) and Arizona State University West, and later taught at UCLA and Pitzer College. She currently co-coordinates the L.A History and Metro Studies group at the Huntington Library. 

Becky has given numerous lectures and presentations, including at Princeton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Georgia Tech, University of Exeter, UK, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Skyscraper Museum (NYC), the Seaside Institute (Florida), dozens of community groups in Los Angeles, and conferences across the U.S. and Europe. Becky is a lifelong Angeleno and lives in the suburban foothills of Los Angeles, with her actor-producer husband, kids, and dogs. 

See a list of Becky’s academic publications at Google Scholar.