Biography

Lynchburg College - International Studies

Sabita Manian is Professor of International Relations at Lynchburg
College, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2001. She also
serves as Chair of the multidisciplinary Liberal Arts Studies program
that she initiated there.

Dr. Manian’s teaching repertoire at LC includes nearly 22 courses
such as Global Politics; Terror and Honor Politics: South Asia; and The
Developing World. As part of another popular course, U.N. Politics, she
leads her students to New York City for an experiential learning
simulation where they participate in the role-playing of U.N. officials
with 2,500 other students and actively learn the complex skills of
policymaking that require compromise and negotiation in the pursuit of
international peace and cooperation. Additionally, in fulfilling her
ethos of community and citizenship, she has developed service-learning
classes to India and St. Lucia that foster transnational collaboration
among Lynchburg College students and some of the economically
underprivileged groups in those countries.

Dr. Manian’s extensive research and publishing record stretches from
gender politics and sex trafficking, including a co-edited book, Sex Trafficking: A Global Perspective (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2010), to journal articles, book chapters, academic
papers and public lectures on politics in the Mideast, the foreign
policies of China and Taiwan, peace prospects between Pakistan and
India, and ethnic and immigration politics in the Americas. She has
presented academic papers nationally and internationally (in Belize,
Belgium, China, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe
and India). More recently, she has focused on collecting the oral
history of descendants of East Indian indentured laborers in St. Lucia,
who constitute a small minority there and whose historiography is almost
nonexistent. She intends to contribute her compiled ethnographic
history to the national archive in St. Lucia as an important record of
East Indian heritage in the country.

Among the many honors that Dr. Manian has received are the Shirley
Rosser Award for Excellence in Teaching (2010) — Lynchburg College’s
highest teaching award — and the Thomas Allen Award for Excellence in
Advising (2014). Born in Calcutta, India, Dr. Manian now lives in
Lynchburg, Virginia with her research- and life-partner, Dr. Brad
Bullock.