Thomas J. “Tom” Sugrue is a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with expertise in urban history, civil rights, race relations, housing and real estate, and the history of liberalism and conservatism. In addition to his teaching positions, he is founding director of the Urban Studies Program and the Cities Collaborative at New York University. Sugrue’s commentary on modern American history, politics, and urban policy has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Nation, and National Geographic. An advocate for public-facing scholarship, he has served as an expert witness in legal cases and as a consultant for private foundations and businesses as well as public institutions and agencies.
Professional positions
- 2015–present: Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, New York University
- 1991–2015: Lecturer (1991–1992), assistant (1992–1997) to associate (1997–1998) professor of history, associate professor of history and sociology (1998–1999), Bicentennial Class of 1940 Term Professor of History and Sociology (1999–2004), Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of History and Sociology (2004–2009), and David Boies Professor of History and Professor of Sociology (2009–2015), University of Pennsylvania
Notable publications
- Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, and Thomas J. Sugrue. 2015. These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present. W. W. Norton.
- Sugrue, Thomas J. 2010. Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. Lawrence Stone Lectures. Princeton University Press.
- Sugrue, Thomas J. 2008. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Random House.
- Sugrue, Thomas J. 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives. Princeton University Press.
Degrees
- PhD, American history, Harvard University
- AM, American history, Harvard University
- MA, British history, Cambridge University
- BA, British history, Cambridge University
- BA, history, Columbia University
