Manisha Sinha

Manisha Sinha
Parent	Srinivas Kumar Sinha
Academic background
Alma mater	Columbia University
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	Reconstruction
Institutions	University of Massachusetts, Amherst University of Connecticut

Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Karsten R. Stueber, a philosophy professor at the College of the Holy Cross, their two sons, Sheel and Shiv Stueber, and dog, Wylie.

Early life

Her father was Srinivas Kumar Sinha, an Indian Army general. She received her PhD from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize.

Career

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the President elect 2024 of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She was born in India and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was named Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review, book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication, and one of three great History books of 2016 in Bloomberg News. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2022. She is the Eighth recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Award for 2021 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2018, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot. In 2003, she was appointed to the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Organization of American Historians. She sits on the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, the Advisory Council of the American Civil War Museum, the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, and the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library. She is also an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. She is co-editor of the Race in the Atlantic Series of the University of Georgia Press and on the editorial board of the journal, Slavery and Abolition. She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for over twenty years, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed on faculty. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, is forthcoming in March 2024 from Liveright (W.W. Norton).

Professor Sinha has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Huffington Post and has been interviewed by the national and international press. She has been on National Public Radio, NBC, Democracy Now, BBC News, C-SPAN, Pacifica, Euro News, Canadian Television News, Canadian Broadcasting Company, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, China Global News, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are, and was an advisor and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), which is a part of the NEH funded Created Equal series. She has lectured all over the country and internationally in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, India, Ireland, and New Zealand. The Chinese rights to The Slave’s Cause have recently been sold to Beijing Han Tang Zhi Dao Book Distribution Co., Ltd.

Works

• The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ISBN 9780807825716, OCLC 469742367
• The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. ISBN 9780300181371, OCLC 1039313848
• The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, Liveright, 2024. ISBN 9781631498442, OCLC 1379265882

External links

• Manisha Sinha, Historian
• https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168091
• Appearances on C-SPAN