Manisha Sinha

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and immediate Past President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. She was nominated to the OAH Distinguished Lecture Series in 2003. A Guggenheim fellow for 2022-2023, she has received several other fellowships from the NEH and the Mellon foundation. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which was cited in the New York Times’ 1619 project and named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico. She is also the author of the multi award winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction and translated into Chinese in 2025. She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for over twenty years where she received the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She was a visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot in 2018 and at the University of Heidelberg in 2022, where she received the 2021 Pennington award. She has published widely in the mainstream press, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Boston Globe, and The Nation, to name a few and has been interviewed in the national and international press. Her recent book The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 won the President’s Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in 2026.