Manisha Sinha

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. 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. Her latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, published by Liveright (W.W. Norton) in 2024.

She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2022. Professor Sinha is the President-Elect, 2024, of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the Eighth recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Award in 2021 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2018, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot, and was elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2003, she was appointed to the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Organization of American Historians. She is a member of the Historian Advisory Council of the American Civil War Museum, Richmond, 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 sits on the Council of the American Antiquarian Society and the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. She is co-editor of the Race in the Atlantic Series of the University of Georgia Press and is 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.

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. 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.