Graduate Program Director
303 New Africa House
545-4779 or 545-2751
Office Hours: by appointment only.
Brief Bio
Manisha Sinha is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was born in India and received her doctorate from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and The Slave's Cause: Abolition and the Origins of American Democracy (Forthcoming, Yale University Press). She is also co-editor of the two volume 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). In 2011, she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty at the University of Massachusetts and delivered the Distinguished Faculty Lecture. In 2006, she was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society and in 2003, she was appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecture Series. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of North Carolina, and the President's and Whiting fellowships from Columbia University. Her research interests lie in nineteenth century United States history, especially the history of slavery and abolition, the sectional conflict and the coming of the Civil War, political and African American history, and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She has published numerous articles and lectured widely on these topics. She is the editor of the "Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900," series of the University of Georgia Press. She has blogged for the Disunion section of the The New York Times Opinionator, The Huffington Post, and the History News Network.
View Professor Sinha's recent article "The Forgotten Emancipationists" in The New York Times
"The Strange Victory of the Palmetto State" in The New York Times
Click on the following link for Professor Sinha's speech on C-SPAN: Allies for Emancipation: Lincoln and Black Abolitionists
View Professor Sinha's articles in The Huffington Post:
South Carolina's Secession at 150 (12/20/10)
We Are All Americans in the Age of Obama
Publications
Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History,
with Penny Von Eschen, eds. (Columbia University Press, 2007)
African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the Twenty-first Century,
with John H. Bracey, eds. Volume One: to 1877 (New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 2004)
African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the Twenty-first Century,
with John H. Bracey, eds. Volume Two: From 1865 to the Present (New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 2004)
The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina,
(Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000)