Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU. A specialist in twentieth-century American politics, urban history, civil rights, and race, Sugrue was educated at Columbia; King's College, Cambridge; and Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1992. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and past president of both the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association.

At Tulane, his lecture, entitled “The Origins of the Suburban Crisis,” will trace the history of real estate from the 1920s to the present through the story of Euclid, Ohio (famous for the 1926 Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of zoning), examining restrictive covenants, zoning, federal housing programs, and real estate finance.