Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society for the current academic year.

She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty.

She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and featured in The New York Times 1619 Project recently. Her second book, the multiple-award winning The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles. She has lectured all over the world and written widely for the mainstream press including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by the national and international press.

A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is currently writing a book on the Reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War under contract with Liveright (WW Norton).