Esther Sullivan is a nonresident fellow in the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on poverty, environmental inequality, legal regulation, and the built environment, with a special interest in housing.

A large portion of Sullivan’s research investigates the intersecting environmental, financial, and legal inequalities that affect residents of manufactured housing and manufactured home communities. Her book, Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place, winner of the 2019 Robert Park Award, examines the sociolegal, geospatial, and market forces that create housing insecurity for residents in US manufactured home parks. Sullivan has published more than a dozen scholarly articles and given several invited national and international talks on the subject. Her work on this topic has appeared in scholarly journals, including American Sociological Review, Urban Studies, Land Use Policy, Housing Policy Debate, City & Community, and the Journal of the American Planning Association, and has been covered in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and elsewhere. She was named a University of Colorado Denver Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholar for her community-engaged scholarship.

Sullivan holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Chicago and master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from the University of Texas.