Thomas Sugrue

Thomas J. Sugrue  is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU. 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 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and past president of both the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association. He taught from 1991-2015 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.

Sugrue is author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton University Press, 2010), also in French translation , and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House, 2008), a Main Selection of the History Book Club and a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.   His first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton University Press, 1996), won the Bancroft Prize   in American History, the Philip Taft Prize   in Labor History, the President''s Book Award of the Social Science History Association, and the Urban History Association Award for Best Book 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 translated into Japanese. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected The Origins of the Urban Crisis as one of its 100 most influential books of the past one hundred years and published a new edition of _The Origins of the Urban Crisis _as a Princeton Classic. A new edition of the book, covering the Detroit bankruptcy, was published by Princeton in 2014.

Sugrue has given over 300 talks to audiences at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., in Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Argentina, Israel, and Japan, and to academic conferences, community groups, foundations, and religious organizations. Since 2002, he has served as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.