Zach Sell received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently an associate producer for Firelight Films and a visiting assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) at Brown University. He was the Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow at CSSJ during the 2017-18 academic year. As a visiting fellow, he will complete his book Capital through Slavery: U.S. Settler Slavery and the British Imperial World (Forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press). The book examines how economic linkages between Britain and the slaveholding United States determined the character of colonial projects across the British Empire during the mid-nineteenth century. These same colonial projects also shaped U.S. slavery. By focusing upon these connections, Capital through Slavery also examines the emergence of relationships between enslaved people in the United States and colonial subjects across the British Empire.

His writing has previously appeared in Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, International Labor and Working-Class History, and Salvage.