Thomas J. Sugrue is Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a member of the graduate faculties in city planning, social welfare, and Africana Studies. Educated at Columbia, Cambridge, and Harvard, Sugrue is author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008). His first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996), won the Bancroft Prize, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Urban History, and the SSHA President’s Book Award. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected Origins as one of its 100 most influential books of the past century. Sugrue’s other books include W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City (1998) and The New Suburban History (2006).
Sugrue has published dozens of scholarly articles on race, public policy, urban issues, and civil rights. He regularly contributes to The Nation, London Review of Books, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. Sugrue’s work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fletcher Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, American Philosophical Society, ACLS, National Endowment for the Humanities, Kellogg Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Brookings Institution. He has been a visiting professor at NYU, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Nanzan University in Japan. Sugrue has served as an expert in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, decided by the Supreme Court in 2003) and most recently U.S. v. City of Euclid (2007). From 2001-2008 he served as vice chair of the Philadelphia Historical Commission, the city agency responsible for historic preservation. He is currently working on several projects including a history of real estate in America from European conquest to the twenty-first century mortgage crisis.
