Manisha Sinha is Professor and Graduate Program Director 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 currently working on a co-authored history of the South, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition and The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina.