Sugrue began his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been a visiting faculty member at
New York University, Harvard University, and the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Sugrue's first book,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis (
Princeton University Press, 1996) won the
Bancroft Prize in History, the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association, the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History, the Urban History Association Prize for Best Book in North American Labor History, and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Book. In 2005, Princeton University Press selected
Origins of the Urban Crisis as one of its 100 most influential books of the preceding century and issued it as a Princeton Classic. Sugrue has also co-edited five books, including
W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), with Michael B. Katz, and
The New Suburban History (
University of Chicago Press, 2005), with
Kevin M. Kruse. His 2008 book
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North was a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History, and a main selection of the
History Book Club. He is also author of
Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. and
These United States: The Making of a Nation, 1890 to the Present with
Glenda Gilmore. He has also published essays and reviews in
The Wall Street Journal,
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
The Nation,
London Review of Books,
Chicago Tribune,
The Philadelphia Inquirer, and
Detroit Free Press. In 2010 he served as a guest-blogger for
Ta-Nehisi Coates at
The Atlantic. Sugrue has won fellowships and grants from the
Brookings Institution, the Social Science Research Council, the
Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is an elected Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
New York Institute for the Humanities, and is the Walter Lippmann Fellow of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 2013–14, he served as President of the Urban History Association.{{cite web|url=https://www.urbanhistory.org/Past-Leadership ==Background==