Manisha Sinha
Professor, History
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and featured in The New York Times 1619 Project. Her recent book, the multiple-award winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. The Slave’s Cause was widely reviewed in the mainstream press and was featured as the editor’s choice in The New York Times Book Review.
Professor Sinha has published and been interviewed in national and international media. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. She is also the recipient of numerous awards including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and two from the Mellon Foundation. In 2018, she was a visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot and in 2021, she received the James W.C. Pennington award, from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She is a member of the Board of the Society of Civil War Historians and of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library. She is a co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press and is on the editorial board of Slavery and Abolition. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is currently writing a book on the Reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War under contract with Liveright (WW Norton).
