Faculty "Dream Team" Returns for Undergrad Course on the American West
This spring quarter, undergraduate students at Stanford will again have the opportunity to take a class as rich and wide as the region that surrounds us: the American West, a ten-week interdisciplinary course taught by instructors from five departments and two schools.
The teaching team is a highly interdisciplinary group of distinguished faculty: political scientist Bruce E. Cain, the Charles Louis Ducommun Professor in Humanities and Sciences; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, professor of English; David Freyberg, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; David M. Kennedy, the Center co-founder and Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus; and Connie Wolf, director of the Cantor Arts Center.
All of the instructors will be present throughout most of the sessions, which combines a sequence of two or three half-hour lectures with periods of discussion and debate among the students and professors, from the perspectives of their own varying academic disciplines.
Using the framework of five major western themes—borders; space; boom and bust; Native Americans; and water—the course aims to introduce students to the unique characteristics and challenges of the American West: its history, physical geography, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, economics, and particular public policy issues.
“With lectures and readings woven around large themes, students get a truly integrated perspective on the evolution and current state of this critical and endlessly fascinating region,” says Bruce Cain, the Eccles Family faculty director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West.
“The strengths of the course are amazing and almost as vast as the West itself," wrote Michele Marincovich of the debut offering in 2014. Marinkovich is senior advisor to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the former longtime director of Stanford’s Center for Teaching and Learning. “A 'dream team' of faculty as both teachers and scholars,” she continued, “three dedicated and able course assistants, capacious and engaging themes, rich visual and textual material, and an infrastructure of support from the Lane Center”.
As its first formal term-time course offering, the Center sees The American West as a portal to the study of the region, one that might lead students to further coursework, research, internships—and a future as leaders in the American West.
"The cultivation of future regional leaders, well-informed and engaged early in their lives with the region’s history, health, and prospects," says David M. Kennedy, "is among our cardinal aims."
