Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. For twenty-four years, he was at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was David Boies Professor of History and Sociology and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. A specialist in twentieth-century American politics, urban history, civil rights, and race, Sugrue was educated at Columbia; King’s College, Cambridge; and Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1992. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the past president of the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association. He received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Wayne State University.
He is author of (Princeton University Press, 2010) and (Random House, 2008), a Main Selection of the History Book Club and a finalist for the . His first book, (Princeton University Press, 1996), won the in American History, the in Labor History, the of the Social Science History Association, and the in North American Urban History and was selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book, an American Prospect On-Line Top Shelf Book on Race and Inequality, and a Lingua Franca Breakthrough Book on Race. It has been . In 2005, Princeton University Press selected The Origins of the Urban Crisis as one of its of the past one hundred years and published a new edition of The Origins of the Urban Crisis as a Princeton Classic.
Sugrue’s most recent book is ,coauthored with Glenda Gilmore of Yale University. A selection of the History Book Club and the Military History Book Club, it has been and the New York Times, which hailed it as “revisionist history at its best.” Sugrue is currently engaged in a research project on race, ethnicity, and citizenship in France and the United States and spent part of June 2009 conducting research in the suburbs of Paris. His long-term research project is a history of the rise and travails of the modern American real estate industry, from the late nineteenth century to the current economic crisis. Sugrue’s other books include (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), co-edited with Michael B. Katz and, more recently, (University of Chicago Press, 2006) with Kevin Kruse. With Michael Kazin and Glenda Gilmore, he is co-editor of the book series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Several books in the critically acclaimed series have won major prizes. Sugrue also serves on a number of other editorial boards.
Sugrue has published over 30 articles in such places as the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, Labor History, Prospects, International Labor and Working-Class History, American Behavioral Scientist, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Michigan Journal of Race and the Law, Budapest Quarterly, and in several edited collections on a wide range of topics including modern American culture and politics, affirmative action, twentieth-century conservatism and liberalism, race, urban economic development, suburbanization, poverty and public policy, and colonial American history. His essays and reviews have also appeared in London Review of Books, The Nation, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Dissent, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, and Philadelphia Inquirer. He has also blogged on Talking Points Memo. Sugrue’s essay “Affirmative Action from Below” was published in (Palgrave Macmillan), a collection of ten essays selected from over three hundred learned and popular journals. His work has been translated into Japanese, German, French, and Hungarian.
Sugrue has won fellowships and grants from the , the Fletcher Foundation, the in Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kellogg Foundation, and the and has been Research Fellow in Governmental Studies at the in Washington, DC. He is also an invited fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He has been a visiting professor at the , New York University, and the in Paris. As a 2007 winner of the Organization of American Historians/Japanese Association of American Studies Residency, he spent part of summer 2007 at in Nagoya, Japan. Sugrue has also served on the boards of the , the Urban History Association (UHA), the Social Science History Association (SSHA), and the (for four years as vice chair for the library), has co-chaired the program committee of the SSHA, and has served on program and prize committees for the Organization of American Historians, the Policy History Association, UHA, and SSHA.
Sugrue is an award-winning teacher. His courses on America in the 1960s and on U.S. History from 1877-1933 have been selected “Hall of Fame Classes” by the Penn Course Review and he won the 1998 and 2012 Richard Dunn Teaching Award in the University of Pennsylvania Department of History. He has advised dissertations in history, social welfare, American civilization, sociology, and the history and sociology of science, and has served as an external examiner at Brown, Georgetown, Rutgers, and Sciences Po, and a three-time mentor for dissertation fellows at the at the University of Virginia.
Outside the classroom, Sugrue combines scholarly research and civic engagement. For six years , he was co-chair of the board of directors of the , a foundation that supports grassroots organizations working for racial and economic equality. He also served for more than six years as Vice Chair of the , the city agency that handles preservation, planning, and development issues. Sugrue is also involved in civil rights policy locally and nationally. He served as an expert for the University of Michigan in in its undergraduate and law school admissions, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. More recently, he served as an expert witness in the voting rights case, . Sugrue’s scholarship was also cited by Justice Stephen Breyer in the dissenting opinion in In July 2008, Sugrue testified before the .
Sugrue has given over 300 talks to audiences at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., in Argentina, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Israel, and Japan, and to academic conferences, community groups, foundations, and religious organizations. Since 2002, he has served as an
