Suny was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, after beginning his career as an assistant professor at Oberlin College.

1941), Suny acted in plays both in high school and college as well as at his uncle Mesrop Kesdekian's summer stock theater, Green Hills Playhouse, outside of Reading, Pennsylvania.

His fields of study are the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; nationalism; ethnic conflict; the role of emotions in politics; South Caucasus; and Russian/Soviet historiography.

The following year he spent ten months in Moscow and Yerevan on the official US-USSR cultural exchange program working on his dissertation on the revolution of 1917–1918 in Baku.

This approach radically contrasted with the orthodox view of Western social scientists during the Cold War that the Soviet treatment of non-Russians was "nation-destroying" repression and Russification.

Suny's intellectual interests have centered on the non-Russian nationalities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, particularly those of the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia).

[7] In 1997, after an appearance at a conference at the American University of Armenia, Suny was accused by nationalist historians of lacking Armenian patriotism and using unverifiable evidence in his claim that Muslims dominated in the population of Yerevan at the turn of the twentieth century.

Suny defended his view by arguing that the data came from imperial Russian censuses and had previously been used by serious Armenian historians in the West like George Bournoutian and Richard G.

[8] In 1998, Armenian historian Armen Ayvazyan published the book The History of Armenia as Presented in American Historiography, a significant part of which was dedicated to criticizing Suny's Looking Toward Ararat.