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, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
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. 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 in 2015. Sinha is also a contributing author of The Abolitionist Imagination, and co-editor of African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century and Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History. She was awarded the Chancellor's Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty and received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for over twenty years. She was elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, and was appointed to the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Lecture Series. Sinha is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including two year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, fellowships from the Charles Warren Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, the Howard Foundation fellowship at Brown University, and the Rockefeller Post-Doctoral fellowship from the Institute of the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research interests lie in early United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has published numerous articles and lectured widely on these topics. She is a member of the Council of Advisors for the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, 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 the Journal of the Civil War Era. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and The Huffington Post; and been interviewed by The Times of London and The Boston Globe. Sinha appeared on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show in 2014. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists, which is a part of the NEH funded "Created Equal" film series.
