He is the author of three books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), and The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018) – and the editor or coeditor of multiple collections. His work has been supported by major fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute, and other sources.

Engerman has been especially active in the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), winning both the Stuart L. Bernath Book and Lecture prizes, an Honorable Mention for the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize. He also served as elected president of the society in 2016.

His current research explores the political and intellectual aspects of global economic inequality in the half-century after World War II.