Manisha Sinha

Manisha Sinha holds the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and is past president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. 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. Her most recent book is The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860 – 1920 (2024) has been widely reviewed in the mainstream press. Her first book. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000), was named one of the ten best books on slavery by Politico. Her 2016 book, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, won the Frederick Douglass, the OAH Avery Craven, the SHA James Rawley, SHEAR Best book prizes and was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. The Chinese edition of the book was published in 2025.

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 has received numerous other fellowships. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. 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 advisory council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Sinha was an AAS-NEH fellow in 2004-5 and the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at AAS in 2020-21.