Professor Sundquist is the author or editor of eight books in the area of American literature and culture, including Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (2005) and To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), which received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association for best book published during the year, the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa for the best book in the humanities, and the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award. His other works include Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1978), Faulkner: The House Divided (1983), The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (1992), the co-authored Volume 2 of the Cambridge History of American Literature (1995), and essay collections or anthologies on American Realism, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ralph Ellison.

Eric Sundquist became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. He also received the MELUS Distinguished Scholar Award in 1996 and the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences Faculty Award in 1995. From 1991 through 1997 he was general editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Studies in American Literature and Culture, and he has served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and the National Council of the American Studies Association. In addition to teaching at UCLA, Professor Sundquist has been a member of the faculties at UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, and Northwestern University, where he was Dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences from 1997 through 2002.