Professor Sullivan earned a PhD in 1968 at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, from which he also earned a masters degree. He taught at John Jay College or 33 years and was from 1986 to 1989 the first chair of its Government Department (now the Political Science Department).  During much of the 1980s, Sullivan worked with the philosopher Hans-George Gadamer in Heidelberg in Germany. He translated Gadamer’s Philosophical Apprenticeships (MIT Press, 1985) and published Political Hermeneutics (Penn State Press, 1989), a book dealing with Gadamer’s early writings.

During the 1990s, Sullivan published Crime and Liberalism (Lexington Books, 2000) and edited Crime, Risk, and Justice (Willan Books, 2000). During this period he also functioned as Deputy EO of CUNY’s Criminal Justice PhD Program. In the first decade of this century, Sullivan worked as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in London, where he published several reviews.  Throughout his career, Sullivan published articles in multiple refereed academic journals, including Orbis, the Australian Journal of Politics and History, the Midwest Political Science Review, and Polity.

He also published articles in Eighteenth Century Studies, the Legal Studies Forum, the Journal of Criminal Justice, the Journal of Church and State, the Lamar Journal of the Humanities, and the Canadian journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences.  Professor Sullivan retired from CUNY in 2000 and has since been pursuing a career in real estate finance in Brooklyn.