| Manisha Sinha | |
| Parents: | Srinivas Kumar Sinha |
| Alma Mater: | Columbia University |
| Discipline: | History |
| Sub Discipline: | Reconstruction |
| Workplaces: | 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.[1] She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.[2] and, most recently The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).
Her father was Srinivas Kumar Sinha, an Indian Army general.[3] She received her PhD from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize.
Sinha's research focuses on early United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Sinha is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000),[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015.,[9] 2016's The Slave's Cause, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery O. Craven Award for Best Book on the Civil War Era, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic's Best Book Prize, the James A Rawley Award for the Best Book on Secession and the Sectional Crisis, and was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction.[10] [11] In 2024, Sinha published her most recent monograph, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.[12]
Sinha is also a contributing author of The Abolitionist Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2012), and co-editor of African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to the Twenty First Century (Prentice Hall, 2004) and Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History (Columbia University Press, 2007).
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 has received 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. In 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[13] [14]
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, the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, the Historians' Advisory Council of the American Civil War Museum, and the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. She was 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 lives in Massachusetts with her family.
[20] "How the Supreme Court got things so wrong on the Trump ruling," CNN March 4, 2024[21]
"What Made Early America?" William and Mary Quarterly 81 (January 2024): 65-72[22]
"The Beautiful Struggle," The New York Review of Books, April 20, 2023[23]
"Why I Hope 2022 will be another 1866," CNN October 12, 2022[24]
"The Perils of Public Engagement," Modern American History, July 2022[25]
"The Case for a Third Reconstruction," The New York Review of Books, February 3, 2021[26]
"What this 18th Century Poet Reveals About Amanda Gorman's Success," CNN February 1, 2021[27]
"Why Kamala Harris Matters to Me," The New York Times, August 12, 2020[28]
"The 2020 Election Surpasses all Before It, Except One," CNN, October 28, 2020.[29]
"Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor," The New York Times, November 29, 2019[30]
"The Long History of American Slavery Reparations," The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2019[31]
"The New Fugitive Slave Laws," The New York Review of Books, July 17, 2019[32]
"The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism," American Historical Review, 124 (February 2019): 144-163[33]
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities, US and Canada, 2022–2023
James W.C. Pennington Award, University of Heidelberg, Germany, 2021
Mellon Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester 2020–2021
Kidger Award for excellence in teaching, research and writing, and service to the profession, New England History Teachers' Association, 2018
Top 25 Women in Higher Education and Beyond, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, March 9, 2017
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2016–2017
Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2016
Exceptional Merit Award, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2013
Chancellor's Medal and Distinguished Faculty Lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2011
Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University, 2009–2010
Faculty Fellowship, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 2007–2008
Elected Member, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, 2006-
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, 2004–2005
Appointed to Distinguished Lecture Series, Organization of American Historians, 2003-