About

Sean Fraga is an assistant professor (teaching) of Environmental Studies and History at USC Dornsife. He is an environmental historian specializing in the North American West and the eastern Pacific Ocean during the long nineteenth century. His research focuses on the connections between U.S. imperial expansion, Native sovereignty, technology, and the environment. Fraga's digital humanities work explores how emerging technologies, such as augmented reality and spatial methods, can support scholarly engagement with primary sources. He is the author of a book project titled 'Ocean Fever: Steam Power, Transpacific Trade, and American Colonization of Puget Sound,' which is under contract with Yale University Press. The book examines how Americans viewed Puget Sound's deep harbors as gateways to the Pacific and how their efforts to develop Northwest seaport towns impacted coastal environments and Native populations. Fraga is also the creator and project director of Booksnake, a scholarly app that enables close looking and embodied interaction with digitized archival materials through augmented reality, emphasizing the importance of physical properties of archival objects for historical interpretation. His scholarly publications include articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, Mobilities, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, and his work has been recognized with awards such as the Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize and the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities Dissertation Prize. Fraga holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in history from Princeton University and a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University. He is actively involved in fostering interdisciplinary scholarly communities, co-founding the Environmental Humanities Working Group at USC and co-organizing the annual Immersive Technologies and Cultural Heritage Symposium.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Political Science
• Ancient history
• Anthropology
• Ethnology
• Archaeology
• Law
• Geography
• Psychology
• Economic history

Selected publications

• From Estuary to Empire: The Transformation of San Pedro Bay - James Tejani. A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2024. 464 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978132409355-8.

  The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  From Estuary to Empire: The Transformation of San Pedro Bay - James Tejani. A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2024. 464 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978132409355-8. - Volume 24 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• Introducing Booksnake: A Scholarly App for Transforming Existing Digitized Archival Materials into Life-Size Virtual Objects for Embodied Interaction in Physical Space, using IIIF and Augmented Reality

  Digital humanities quarterly · 2025-04-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We introduce Booksnake, a new mobile app that makes it feel like digitized archival items are physically present in a user’s real-world surroundings by using the augmented reality (AR) technology in consumer smartphones and tablets. Unlike humanities projects that use virtual reality (VR) or AR to publish custom content, Booksnake is a general-purpose, content-agnostic tool compatible with existing online collections that support the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). In this article, we critique existing flat-screen image viewers and discuss the benefits of embodied interaction with archival materials. We contextualize Booksnake within the broader landscape of immersive technologies for cultural heritage. We detail the technical pipeline by which Booksnake transforms existing digitized archival materials into custom life-size virtual objects for interaction in physical space. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future of the immersive humanities.

  PublisherDOI

• Cameron Blevins. <i>Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Cameron Blevins. Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. Get access Cameron Blevins. Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 232. Cloth $34.95. Sean Fraga Sean Fraga University of Southern California, USA Email: sfraga@usc.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6804-4486 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 481–482, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad123 Published: 31 March 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Mobilities and Ethnic Studies

  Ethnic studies review · 2023-01-01

  article

  Following the publication of a 2022 special issue in the journal Mobilities, several of the contributing authors and editors gathered virtually on July 26, 2022. Drawing upon the work included w the collection called “Mobilizing Indigeneity and Race Within and Against Settler Colonialism,” the participants discuss how they came to the subject of mobilities, how this concept impacts their work, and the ways it intersects with the fields of Ethnic Studies and Indigenous Studies. The special issue editors Carpio, Barraclough, and Barnd interview and facilitate the discussion between authors Vasquez Ruiz, Toomey, Katz, and Fraga. This article includes a reading list of scholarship used for the special issue on race, Indigeneity, and mobilities.

  PublisherDOI

• Steam power, native labor, and contested terraqueous mobilities during American settlement of Puget Sound, 1846–1873

  Mobilities · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Ethnology

  During U.S. colonization of the mid-nineteenth-century coastal Pacific Northwest, Native peoples and white American settlers used canoes and steamboats to imagine and sustain multiple overlapping mobilities within the same territory. Native peoples’ persistent mobility disrupted and delayed American colonization. Analyzing historical descriptions of mobility enables us to recover how Natives and non-Natives (primarily American settlers and U.S. officials) understood connections between technology, mobility, the environment, and power. A terraqueous approach highlights connections between land and water. While settlers routinely relied on Native canoe pullers to traverse Pacific Northwest waters into the mid-1870s, many resented this dependence and saw Native mobility as impeding U.S. colonization. Settlers imagined steamboats would let them control their own movements and those of Native peoples. Instead, steamboats became another way Native people integrated settlers into existing Native networks. Today, Pacific Northwest Native peoples have deliberately re-framed canoe mobility as a contemporary articulation of Native identity and sovereignty. Studying terraqueous mobility in a coastal border region offers fresh insights into the ways settler colonialism works (or tries to work) by revealing the importance of mobile Native labor as both an element of and an obstacle to settler colonization.

  PublisherDOI

• West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

  American Nineteenth Century History · 2021 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • History
  • Economic history

  Where should you shelve Kevin Waite’s new book, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire? If you keep your books organized by region, as I do, you may find yourself asking w...

  PublisherDOI

• Digitally Mapping Commercial Currents: Maritime Mobility, Vessel Technology, and U.S. Colonization of Puget Sound, 1851–1861

  Current Research in Digital History · 2020-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How important was steam power to U.S. colonization of the Pacific Northwest? This article uses data from an archival handwritten ledger covering the Puget Sound Customs District’s first decade (1851–1861) to investigate the use of steam-powered maritime mobility by non-natives during initial American settlement. By tracking individual vessels into and out of Puget Sound, these data make it possible to examine historical vessel traffic at a much finer resolution than is available in published sources. Mapping and visualizing this data shows that settlers relied far more on sailing vessels than on steam-powered ones. Although steam power captured settlers’ imaginations, steam-powered vessels made up a relatively small portion of Puget Sound vessel traffic and served fewer ports over a smaller area than did sailing vessels. While the 1858 Fraser River gold rush significantly altered regional travel patterns, its lasting impact on Puget Sound’s merchant marine was a new flotilla of small, simple sailing vessels that operated largely within the Pacific Northwest’s sheltered waters. Ultimately, this project demonstrates the potential of digitally analyzing raw data from similar records to better understand the maritime dimensions of U.S. territorial expansion.

  PublisherDOI

• Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands

  American Nineteenth Century History · 2020-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands." American Nineteenth Century History, 21(1), pp. 98–99

  PublisherDOI

• “An Outlet to the Western Sea”: Puget Sound, Terraqueous Mobility, and Northern Pacific Railroad’s Pursuit of Trade with Asia, 1864–1892

  Western Historical Quarterly · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The Northern Pacific Railroad saw Puget Sound harbors as environments uniquely suited to connect the North American interior with the Pacific Ocean and enable U.S. trade with East Asia. But in building the physical infrastructure to link transcontinental trains with transpacific ships, Northern Pacific significantly altered Commencement Bay’s shoreline and displaced Puyallups from their traditional territory. The articles uses a terraqueous perspective, emphasizing movement between terrestrial and aqueous environments, to demonstrate how U.S. pursuit of transpacific trade shaped the North American West.

  PublisherDOI

• Pacific Ties: Recovering the Lives of Chinese Railroad Workers in North America - Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. xiii + 539 pp. $90.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-50-360829-0; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-50-360924-2.

  The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · 2020-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Pacific Ties: Recovering the Lives of Chinese Railroad Workers in North America - Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. xiii + 539 pp. 30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-50-360924-2. - Volume 19 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michelle Vasquez Ruiz

  University of Southern California

  4 shared

• Irit Katz

  2 shared

• Genevieve Carpio

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Laura Barraclough

  American University

  2 shared

• Natchee Blu Barnd

  Oregon State University

  2 shared

• Nisha Toomey

  2 shared

• Paulo Paschoal Borges

  Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia

  1 shared

• Sidney Pereira Sobral

  Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Qualidade e Tecnologia

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  Princeton University

  2019

• M.A., History

  Princeton University

  2015

• B.A., with distinction in the major, American Studies

  Yale University

  2010

Awards & honors

• 2020 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize
• 2019 Princeton Center for Digital Humanities Dissertation Pr…
• Finalist for the 2024 Paul Fortier Prize, Alliance of Digita…