She specializes in 18th- and 19th-century U.S. history and comparative slavery. Her first book, American Slaves and African Masters (2012), explores the slavery that Americans captured by Barbary pirates or shipwrecked in the Western Sahara endured and explores the flexibility of slavery as an institution. http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137268662.

Dr. Sears co-edited New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community and Comparisons in Slave Studies (LSU Press, 2015). Dr. Sears’s chapter, “‘In Algiers, the City of Bondage’: Comparative Slavery in the Urban Context,” challenges the notion that slavery was ill suited to urban environments. http://lsupress.org/books/detail/new-directions-in-slavery-studies/. 

Her newest projects center on the early American republic maritime world more broadly. One article historicizes the meaning of citizenship by analyzing how citizen-sailors were affected by the state and how they influenced the state’s development. Another work illuminates the attachment many sailors had to their family, arguing that some Jack Tars were family men.