Thomas J. Sugrue, professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum, has been elected president of the Social Science History Association. It is the leading international association in the field. 

He will deliver his presidential address at the 2014 SSHA conference in Toronto on the theme “Inequalities: Politics, Policy and the Past.” 

Sugrue, who works on the history of race, cities and politics in modern America, is author of several books, including the Bancroft Prize-winning The Origins of the Urban Crisis, as well as Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North and Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and he is a frequent contributor to major newspapers and magazines.  

The SSHA promotes interdisciplinary research by historians, demographers, economists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars and geographers on social life and theory; historiography and historical and social-scientific methodologies; and the state and society.