Parker History Lecture

Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Educated at Columbia, Cambridge, and Harvard, he is a twentieth-century U.S. historian of American cities and suburbs, race, civil rights, politics and public policy. Sugrue is past president of the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Royal Historical Society, the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the Society of American Historians.

Sugrue’s first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton University Press, 1996), won four awards, including the Bancroft Prize in History. His second book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House, 2008), is the first comprehensive history of the Black freedom struggle outside the South. Sugrue is also author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton University Press, 2010) and These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2015), with Glenda Gilmore. Sugrue has co-edited several books including W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); The New Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Neoliberal Cities (NYU Press, 2020); and The Long Year: A 2020 Reader (Columbia University Press, 2022). He regularly contributes to newspapers and other media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, National Geographic, and London Review of Books.

Sugrue has won fellowships and grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fletcher Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, ACLS, NEH, SSRC, and the Brookings Institution. Sugrue has won two teaching awards, is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and has given over 450 public talks worldwide in the last two decades. He has also served as an expert witness in several civil rights and voting rights cases, has appeared in several documentary films, and regularly consults with museums, foundations, and community organizations.