{"id":185449,"date":"2022-05-10T07:30:29","date_gmt":"2022-05-10T11:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=185449"},"modified":"2022-05-13T10:53:13","modified_gmt":"2022-05-13T14:53:13","slug":"history-professor-manisha-sinha-awarded-guggenheim-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/05\/history-professor-manisha-sinha-awarded-guggenheim-fellowship\/","title":{"rendered":"History Professor Manisha Sinha Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"

UConn history<\/a> professor Manisha Sinha is among 180 Guggenheim Fellows<\/a> named last month, putting her in a prestigious category alongside only two dozen other UConn faculty members in the last 65 years.<\/p>\n

The 2022 fellowship class<\/a> comprises artists and scholars from throughout the United States and Canada and includes those whose expertise varies from the natural sciences to social sciences, humanities to creative arts. Sinha is one of five to receive awards for research in U.S. history and was among nearly 2,500 fellowship applicants.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a bit of a dream come true,\u201d she says of the award. \u201cI\u2019m very appreciative of the support I\u2019ve gotten from UConn, from the administration in particular.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History<\/a> in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>, a position she\u2019s held since 2016 after coming to UConn from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.<\/p>\n

During the next two semesters, she will continue work on a book project on Reconstruction that was started several years ago and looks at how the South was admitted back into the Union after the Civil War.<\/p>\n

\u201cI give a lot of attention to the traditional story, but I connect it to other issues like the fight for women\u2019s suffrage,\u201d she says of the book. \u201cI connect it to Western history and the subjugation of the Plains Indians. I also look at the unwinding of Reconstruction when the federal government gave up on enforcing Black rights in the South. That gave rise to the Jim Crow South when Black men were disenfranchised, and racial segregation and racist terror and lynching became commonplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

It’s an ambitious project, she admits, but one that came with support from a fellowship with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Mellon research fellowship through the American Antiquarian Society.<\/p>\n

What makes it unique, she says, is the expanded time period studied \u2013 1860 to 1900 vs. the usual 1865 to 1877 \u2013 and the links drawn between Reconstruction and other societal issues of the day.<\/p>\n

\"Nikole
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, in conversation with Manisha Sinha, professor of history, at the Student Union Theater on March 30, 2022. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cEven though I\u2019ve done a lot of primary research for this book, there\u2019s been a lot of scholarship that\u2019s come out on the women\u2019s suffrage movement, on Native American history and Western history that I can piggyback off of,\u201d Sinha says. \u201cThat\u2019s what historians do; we do our own research but it\u2019s really a combined effort when you want to tell a big story of a certain period. You really benefit from the other work other historians have done on smaller parts of your project.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2019, Sinha hosted a conference at UConn drawing international experts to look at Reconstruction, the result of which will be an anthology she also expects to edit over the next year. While working on the Reconstruction book, she\u2019s shelved a Yale University Press project on abolition, something she says she may resume if time allows.<\/p>\n

For now, it\u2019s Reconstruction that has her attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistorians are always influenced by the times that we write in,\u201d she says, explaining an earlier book she wrote on abolition<\/a> was done during the Obama administration when the country\u2019s mood was hopeful. \u201cThis book on Reconstruction came out of the last few years politically.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the Trump administration, at least one journal article she wrote went viral<\/a>, Sinha says, because it suggested the country was backsliding in its democratic principles and civil rights and immigration policies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really reminded me of the Reconstruction period when there was a real backlash to Reconstruction and you had this huge reaction that led to the Jim Crow South and disenfranchisement,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not as if history is repeating, but there were some parallels in the way some events unfolded. You have progress and backlash, progress and backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says she\u2019s also been influenced by her undergraduate students who tell her they understand Reconstruction when she talks about it in class, but the companion readings confuse them.<\/p>\n

For their sake and because the Reconstruction book comes from commercial publisher Liveright Norton, she says, \u201cOne of my aims is to not write a huge book, which is tough because it\u2019s a very big topic. I want to write one that\u2019s accessible to a broader audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis year marks the Foundation\u2019s 97th annual Fellowship competition,\u201d says Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 fellow in poetry. \u201cOur long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people\u2019s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we\u2019re in, where we\u2019ve come from, and where we\u2019re going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sinha is working on an expansive examination of the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":130118,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2275,2226,2076,2235,2306,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2368],"class_list":["post-185449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-affairs","category-clas","category-research","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-voices","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-22 05:57:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185449"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185891,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185449\/revisions\/185891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/130118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185449"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=185449"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=185449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}