Manisha Sinha

Adjunct Associate Professor of History
Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies

Office: 303 New Africa House
Telephone: (413) 545-4779
Fax: (413) 545-0628
email: masinha@afroam.umass.edu

Degree: Ph.D., Columbia University (1994)
Field(s) of interest: Nineteenth Century U.S.: Political, African American, Southern

Research Interests and Professional Activities
Manisha Sinha was born in India and received her doctorate in American History from Columbia University in 1994 where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. She is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the recipient of the President's Fellowship and the Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities from Columbia University, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research fellowship from Harvard University, the Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and grants from the National Endowment in the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), co-editor with John H. Bracey, Jr. of African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the African Slave Trade to The Twenty First Century Vols. I & II (Prentice Hall, 2004) and author of several articles in African American history, southern history, and the coming of the Civil War. Professor Sinha has also lectured widely in southern and African American history. In 2003, she was appointed to the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Lecture Series. She is also the series editor for “Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” University of Georgia Press. At present, she is working on a book on African Americans and the movement to abolish slavery, under contract with Harvard University Press.