Manisha Sinha

Manisha Sinha holds the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. Previously, she taught at the University of Massachusetts for more than 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 (2000), named one of the ten best books on slavery by Politico and featured in The 1619 Project in The New York Times. Her 2016 book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, won numerous awards and was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Her forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 will be published by Liveright in March 2024. In 2018 Sinha 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 was named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow for 2022-23 and is the President-elect 2024 of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She serves on the board of trustees of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History; the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library; and the Historians' Advisory Council of the American Civil War Museum. Sinha was an AAS-NEH fellow in 2004-5 and the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at AAS in 2020-21.