In 2015, she won a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 2016, she won an Andrew Carnegie fellowship. Ta-Nehisi Coates drew upon her work on contract selling in Chicago for his award-winning article, 'The Case for Reparations,' in the Atlantic (June 2014). She has been interviewed by numerous journalists about housing discrimination and police brutality. She has won awards from her university for teaching, scholarship, and contributions to the academic community. She has written scholarly articles on topics ranging from black police officers' struggles against police brutality to the role of therapeutic practices in the New Left. Satter is also a cofounder of the Queer Newark Oral History Project and has received awards for her work on behalf of LGBT youth. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Ridenhouer Book Prize, and was selected as one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Her Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009), about real estate exploitation in mid-twentieth-century Chicago, won the OAH Liberty Legacy Award and the Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Award in History.

Her first book, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (1999), explores relationships among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's rights activism, alternative religion, and Progressive Era beliefs about gender, race, sexuality, and political morality. She specializes in urban history and U.S. Satter is a professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark, where she has taught since 1992.

Family properties by beryl satter