Michael Sugrue

Michael Joseph Sugrue (February 1, 1957 – January 16, 2024) was an American historian and university professor. He spent his early career teaching at Columbia University and conducting research as a Mellon fellow at Johns Hopkins University prior to teaching at Princeton University, where he was the Behrman Fellow at Princeton's Council on the Humanities. After holding various positions at Princeton for over a decade, Sugrue left in 2004 to become a professor of history at Ave Maria University.

In 2020, Sugrue began to acquire an audience when his daughter, Genevieve Sugrue, started publishing his 1992 lecture series Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition (taken while he was teaching at Princeton) on YouTube.

Early life and education Sugrue was born in New York City on February 1, 1957. he attended the University of Chicago, where he had Allan Bloom and Joseph Cropsey as teachers, receiving his undergraduate degree in history in 1979.

After graduating, Sugrue received a Master of Arts, a Master of Philosophy, and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. His dissertation, South Carolina College: The Education of an Antebellum Elite, was completed in 1992.

Sugrue's early work as a scholar largely focused on examining South Carolina College and its former president, Thomas Cooper, in connection with slavery.

Academic career Sugrue taught at the City College of New York, Columbia University, Manhattan College, New York University, Hampton University, and Touro College, among others. From 1992 to 1994, he was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1992, Sugrue encountered Tom Rollins, the founder of The Great Courses, who was searching for a professor to lecture on Machiavelli as part of a series on the history of Western philosophy. Sugrue stepped in to lecture, and the series became a bestseller. Later, as part of a Great Minds program with Darren Staloff (who was also a professor at Princeton), a number of Sugrue's lectures were video-taped and organized into categories including Great Minds of the Western Tradition, Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition and The Bible in Western Culture.

In 2004, Sugrue became a professor of history at Ave Maria University, where he chaired the history department and taught for about twenty years. The New York Times reported that the lectures became an "internet phenomenon" during the COVID-19 pandemic lock-ins.

Sugrue was a Catholic, saying "it is not clear to me that love is a lesser value than truth—I like them both".

In 2011, Sugrue was diagnosed with metastatic cancer and underwent chemotherapy until his death. Sugrue died in Naples, Florida, on January 16, 2024, from complications due to prostate cancer.

Selected works