[1] He was formerly Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University,[2] with an affiliation at NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Sharkey is the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence,[8] published in 2018 by W.W. Norton.

His first book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, was published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press.

[10] He was previously the Director for the Institute for Human Development and Social Change at New York University,[11] a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia University from 2007 to 2009,[12] and a research assistant at the Urban Institute[13] in Washington D.C. Labor and Social Policy Center from 2000 to 2002.

Sharkey received the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award[14] given by the Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association in 2015.