Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor in American History at the University of Connecticut, has been chosen as the recipient of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The award is given out by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City. Professor Sinha will be honored at a reception in New York City on February 22. The award comes with a $25,000 prize.
Professor Sinha was honored for her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016). David W. Blight, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center and the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale stated that “Sinha’s work is a great scholarly achievement, placing Black abolitionists and the fate of fugitive slaves at the center of the story of this country’s prototypical radical reform movement.” The book “is the most comprehensive synthesis of the American abolition movement written since the early works by James Stewart, Richard Sewell, and Merton Dillon in the 1960s and 1970s.”
A native of India, Professor Sinha holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in New York City.