NJCHE Annual Conference
The NJCHE is excited to welcome the following speakers to our annual fall conference on Friday, December 5, 2025 at Princeton University
Dr. Janet Chen, Princeton University: “Teaching Modern Chinese History” (Final title pending)
Dr. Eric Foner, Columbia University: “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution”
Dr. Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut: “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920”
Check back in August for the conference registration packet, including the announcement letter, conference schedule, speaker bios, registration form, and alignment to the New Jersey Student Learning Standards.
Click here to register using our online platform. Credit Card/ACH payments only. (Note that the platform will request a donation to the provider as a processing fee when you register. You can select any amount, including $0.) You can also use the embedded form directly below the speaker bios.
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Dr. Janet Chen, Princeton University
Janet Chen is a historian of modern China, specializing in the twentieth century. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from Williams College. She joined the faculty of the Princeton History Department in 2006, and she is also a member of the East Asian Studies Department.
Professor Chen’s first book, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953 (Princeton University Press, 2012), is a study of the destitute homeless during a time of war and revolution. Focusing on Beijing and Shanghai, the book considers how the advent of workhouses and poorhouses in the early twentieth century represented a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the state, private charity, and the neediest members of society. It draws on local archival research to place “the poor,” rather than their benefactors and custodians, at the center of inquiry.
Chen's second book, The Sounds of Mandarin: Learning to Speak a National Language in China and Taiwan, 1913-1960 (Columbia University Press, 2023) is a social history of how people learned to speak Mandarin. It traces the creation of a national language in the early Republic, the fraught process of linguistic change against the backdrop of war and revolution, its journey to postwar Taiwan, and its reconfiguration as the common language of the People’s Republic after 1949.
Dr. Eric Foner, Columbia University
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. He is one of only two persons to serve as President of the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He has also been the curator of several museum exhibitions, including the prize-winning "A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln," at the Chicago Historical Society. His book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln prizes for 2011. His latest book is Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.
Dr. Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She was born in India and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and recently featured in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was named Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review, book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication, and one of three great History books of 2016 in Bloomberg News. She is the author and editor of numerous articles and other books. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2022. She is the Eighth recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Award for 2021 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2018, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot. In 2003, she was appointed to the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Organization of American Historians. She sits on the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, and the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library. She is on the editorial board of the journal, Slavery and Abolition and is an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for over twenty years, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed on faculty. Her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 was published by Liveright (W.W. Norton) in 2024.
Professor Sinha has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, Dissent, The Nation, Jacobin, and The Huffington Post and has been interviewed by the national and international press. She has been on National Public Radio, PBS, NBC, Democracy Now, BBC News, C-SPAN, Pacifica, Euro News, Canadian Television News, Canadian Broadcasting Company, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, New Zealand Television, China Global News, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are, and was an advisor and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), which is a part of the NEH funded Created Equal series. She has lectured all over the country and internationally in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, India, Ireland, and New Zealand. The Chinese rights to The Slave’s Cause have recently been sold to Beijing Han Tang Zhi Dao Book Distribution Co., Ltd.