Research

Dr. Hagen’s research focuses on frontiers and borderlands, race and indigenous people, labor and migration, the built and natural environments, resources and settler colonialism.  She is especially interested in questions of space, power, violence, law and the state. Through her academic and public history work, she approaches these broad themes from many directions. Based on research in primary sources ranging from archival documents to architectural resources, her work ranges from theoretical analyses of international structural developments to contextualized micro-histories of single historic sites.

Book Manuscript: Undocumented Indians

Northern Plains Borders and the People in Between, 1860 - 1940

Black Montana

Montana's African American Community
1860s - 1960s

Mapping Indigenous Missoula

Urban Indian History
Before the Second World War

Tribal Health, Health Care
& Sovereignty

The Flathead Indian Reservation
1855 - present

Managing the National Forests

Forest Service Administration in
Idaho's Nez Perce and Clearwater

Wilderness-Making & Recreation on Postwar Public Lands  

Industry & Aquaculture
on California's Coast

Drake's Bay Oyster Farm in
Point Reyes National Seashore
Seminole Ranch in the Selway-Bitterroot Backcountry

African-American Homesteaders

Black Settlement in the Rural West

Modernism &
the National Parks

Mission 66 and
Mid-century Architecture in Glacier

Modernism &
the U.S. Forest Service

Mid-century Administrative Architecture

Farm Factories

Bonanza Farming on the
19th Century Northern Plains

The Great Plains Project

Agriculture, Land Use and
the Environment, 1870 to 1990

American Food Systems

Agriculture and
the Rural-Urban Relationship

Whose Poison?

Property, Production and Pollution at Western Mining Centers

Indian Trust Land Management

The Landmark Legal Case of
Eloise Cobell

California Water Rights:
Indian Land & Water Use

The U.S. v. Fallbrook Public Utility District

Shaping the West

History and the Built Environment

Small-Scale Lode Mining
in the Northern Rockies

Four Mile Mine, 1860s - 1960s

The Copper King's Pastoral Domain

Marcus Daly's Racehorse Ranch

Frank Lloyd Wright's First Exercise in Community Planning

Bitter Root, Montana (1908)

Robber Barons Build West

The Pullman Family and
California's Carolands Chateau

Main Street is a Text

Railroad Towns of the Great Plains

The Life of American Buildings

Preservation and Adaptive Re-use

Education & Architecture
in Rural America

Schoolhouses on the Northern Plains

Civil Engineering & Infrastructure
in a River Town

Fort Benton on the Missouri

Revolutionizing Paleontology

The Bynum Rock Shop and
the First Dinosaur Nest Discovery

Activism &
Early Childhood Education in California

The New School of Berkeley, est. 1966

The Mountain Horse Barn

Climate, Economics and
Log Building Traditions
in the High Country