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Sean Fraga

Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Environmental Studies and History
Sean Fraga
Pronouns He / Him / His Email sfraga@usc.edu Office CAS 112

Biography

Sean Fraga is an assistant professor (teaching) of Environmental Studies and History. Fraga is an environmental historian of the North American West and eastern Pacific Ocean during the long nineteenth century. He specializes in connections between U.S. imperial expansion, Native sovereignty, technology, and the environment. His digital humanities research addresses how emerging technologies can support scholarly engagement with primary sources, with particular attention to augmented reality and spatial methods.

 

Fraga’s book project, Ocean Fever: Steam Power, Transpacific Trade, and American Colonization of Puget Sound, is under contract with Yale University Press for publication in the Lamar Series in Western History. Ocean Fever argues that Americans interested in trade with East Asia saw Puget Sound’s deep harbors as valuable portals to the Pacific Ocean and used railroad and shipping connections to build Northwest seaport towns into global commercial hubs. But in the process, American settlers dramatically altered coastal environments and repeatedly displaced Native peoples. Today, Tribal nations around Puget Sound are leveraging their marine sovereignty to shape the region’s future.

 

Fraga is the creator and project director of Booksnake, a free scholarly app for iPhone and iPad that enables close looking and embodied interaction with digitized archival materials via augmented reality. Booksnake is built on a humanistic argument: that digitization strips away contextual information (especially the physical size, scale, and material presence of archival objects) and that recovering those properties matters for historical interpretation. Booksnake produces presence: It transforms existing digitized items into life-size virtual objects that can be explored in physical space. The project’s methods and findings are described in Digital Humanities Quarterly (Winter 2025), and its core method for automatically transforming digital images of archival materials into dimensionally accurate virtual objects is the subject of a U.S. patent (2024). Learn more at booksnake.app.

 

Fraga’s scholarly research has been published in the Western Historical Quarterly, Mobilities, Current Research in Digital History, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post. His work has received several honors, including the 2020 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize for “They Came on Waves of Ink,” a digital history project mapping maritime trade networks in the Pacific Northwest during American settlement; the 2019 Princeton Center for Digital Humanities Dissertation Prize; and a finalist nomination for the 2024 Paul Fortier Prize, awarded by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations for the best paper by an early-career scholar. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North American Society for Oceanic History, and the Newberry Library, among others.

 

At U.S.C., Fraga teaches about environmental history, U.S. engagement with the Pacific Ocean, island and coastal studies, and digital and spatial humanities. He also serves as co-director of the Environmental Data Science M.S. program, a joint degree between the Environmental Studies Program in Dornsife College and the Computer Science and Data Science program in the Viterbi School of Engineering.

 

Beyond his research and teaching, Fraga is cultivates scholarly communities across disciplinary boundaries. In 2020, with Devin Griffiths (English), Fraga co-founded and co-convened the Environmental Humanities Working Group at U.S.C.’s Levan Institute for the Humanities, a forum that brings together scholars across the arts, humanities, and social sciences to engage environmental questions. Fraga is also a co-founder and co-organizer of the Immersive Technologies and Cultural Heritage (ITCH) Symposium, an annual gathering — held at U.S.C. since 2023 — that convenes researchers, archivists, librarians, and practitioners working at the intersection of immersive technology and cultural heritage collections.

 

Fraga holds a Ph.D. and an M.A., both in history, from Princeton University. He received his B.A. in American Studies, with distinction in the major, from Yale University. Before joining U.S.C.’s faculty, he was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in U.S.C.’s Humanities in a Digital World program.

 

Education

  • Ph.D. History, Princeton University, 1/2019
  • M.A. History, Princeton University, 5/2015
  • BA American Studies (intensive), with distinction, Yale University, 5/2010
    • Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, USC–Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Program, University of Southern California, 08/2020 – 08/2022

  • Contracts and Grants Awarded

    • Booksnake: Development and Dissemination of a Scholarly App for Comparing Digitized Archival Materia, (National Endowment for the Humanities), Sean Fraga, Peter Mancall, Curtis Fletcher, $150,000, 2025
    • Booksnake: Building and Testing an Augmented Reality Tool for Embodied Interaction with Existing Dig, (National Endowment for the Humanities), Peter Mancall, Curtis Fletcher, Sean Fraga, $150,000, 2022 – 2024

    USC Funding

    • Undergraduate Research Associates Program, USC Office of the Provost. Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Automatically Determine Physical Dimensions of Cultural Heritage Materials in Digitized Collections: Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Automatically Determine Physical Dimensions of Cultural Heritage Materials in Digitized Collections, $6000, 2025-2026
    • Undergraduate Research Associates Program, USC Office of the Provost. Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Automatically Transform Digitized Archival Materials into Custom Life-Size Virtual Objects: Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Automatically Transform Digitized Archival Materials into Custom Life-Size Virtual Objects, $6000, 2024-2025
    • Undergraduate Research Associates Program, USC Office of the Provost. Using Digital Methods to Map Scholarly Geographies of the North American West: Using Digital Methods to Map Scholarly Geographies of the North American West, $3000, 2023-2024
    • (Fall 2022) ENST 495. Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies, F, 08:00am – 05:50pm
    • (Spring 2023) ENST 495. Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies, F, 08:00am – 05:50pm
    • (Fall 2023) ENST 495. Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies, F, 08:00am – 05:50pm
    • (Spring 2024) ENST 150. Environmental Issues in Society, TTh, 12:30pm – 01:50pm
    • (Spring 2024) ENST 344. Environmental Ethics, MW, 09:00am – 10:20am, WPH
    • (Spring 2024) ENST 499. Special Topics – Waves of Change: Unearthing Coastal Environmental Histories, TBA – TBA, OFFICE
    • (Spring 2024) GESM 130. Seminar in Social Analysis – Pacific Beaches in the American Imagination, TTh, 03:30pm – 04:50pm
    • (Fall 2024) ENST 344. Environmental Ethics, TTh, 02:00pm – 03:20pm, WPH207
    • (Fall 2024) ENST 495. Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies, F, 08:00am – 05:50pm
    • (Fall 2024) ENST 499. Special Topics – Infrastructure and Environmental Justice in United States History, TTh, 10:00am – 11:20am
    • (Spring 2025) ENST 150. Environmental Issues in Society, TTh, 12:30pm – 01:50pm, SLH100
    • (Spring 2025) ENST 499. Special Topics – Waves of Change: Unearthing Coastal Environmental Histories, TBA – TBA
    • (Spring 2025) GESM 130. Seminar in Social Analysis – Pacific Beaches in the American Imagination, TTh, 03:30pm – 04:50pm, LVL3Y
    • (Fall 2025) ENST 344. Environmental Ethics, TTh, 10:30am – 11:50am, DMC258
    • (Fall 2025) ENST 495. Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies, F, 08:00am – 05:50pm
    • (Fall 2025) GESM 130. Seminar in Social Analysis – Pacific Beaches in the American Imagination, TTh, 03:30pm – 04:50pm
    • (Spring 2026) ENST 150. Environmental Issues in Society, TTh, 12:30pm – 01:50pm, SLH100
    • (Spring 2026) ENST 484. Waves of Change: Unearthing Coastal Environmental Histories, TBA – TBA
    • (Spring 2026) ENST 499. Special Topics – Infrastructure and Environmental Justice in U.S. History, TTh, 10:00am – 11:20am, DMC 255

  • Journal Article

    • Fraga, S., Ye, C., Huang, H., Sai, Z., Hughes, M., Yao, A., Ghosh, S. “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 Quarterlyno. 1(2025). Article link
    • Fraga, S. P. (2022). “Steam Power, Native Labor, and Contested Terraqueous Mobilities during American Settlement of Puget Sound, 1846–1873”. Mobilities. Vol. 17 (2), pp. 196–212. article link
    • Fraga, S. P. (2020). “‘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. Vol. 51 (4), pp. 439–451. (article link)
    • Fraga, S. P. (2020). “Digitally Mapping Commercial Currents: Maritime Mobility, Vessel Technology, and U.S. Colonization of Puget Sound, 1851–1861,”. Current Research in Digital History. Vol. 3 (article link)
    • Fraga, S. P. (2014). “Native Americans, Military Science, and Settler Colonialism on the Pacific Railroad Surveys, 1853–1855”. Princeton University Library Chronicle. Vol. 75 (3), pp. 317–349. (article link)
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