Thomas J. Sugrue (born 1962) is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University.

[2] From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania[3] and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum.

Sugrue was born in 1962 in Detroit, Michigan and lived there until the age of ten, when his family moved to the suburbs.

[5] He graduated from Brother Rice High School (Michigan) in 1980 and from Columbia University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1984, with a degree in history.

He earned his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1992 working with Stephan Thernstrom and Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz.

Sugrue's first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton University Press, 1996) was widely acclaimed.

He is also a well-regarded public speaker, having given more than 300 talks to audiences at universities, foundations, community groups, and religious congregations throughout the United States and in Canada, Britain, France, Argentina, Japan, Israel, and Germany.