About the Bill Lane Center
Our Mission
The Bill Lane Center for the West is dedicated to advancing scholarly
and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western
North America. The Center supports research, teaching, and reporting
about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
All of the Center's diverse programming is animated by the same four driving
principles:
1. Be Interdisciplinary
Our programs involve academics across the humanities and social sciences, the biological and environmental sciences, and law and public policy.
2. Engage Broadly
Because some of the most vital thinking and writing about the West goes on beyond the academy, the Center’s programs involve public intellectuals as well as leading academics, and link the research going on within academia to major public policy questions and cultural debates.
3. Think Transnationally
As Western ecosystems and population flows extend across national borders, the Center promotes a transnational approach to Western history, culture, and policy.
4. Reframe the West
The West, through Hollywood, has an enormous influence on popular culture, but otherwise it generally lacks an intellectual, cultural, or social presence within either the country or the continent. The Center is committed to changing this through collaboration across Western institutions, intellectual exchanges between scholars and practitioners, research initiatives that reach across disciplinary and geographic boundaries, and wider dissemination of scholarship that reflects the diversity of the West.
Our Programs and Activities
To these ends, the Center hosts conferences and public forums on a wide range of topics, from the environment and urban growth to politics and governance to depictions of the West in national media and culture. We are broadening the Stanford curriculum in the West, providing students new opportunities to study the region through regular courses , internships and research fellowships, and research seminars . And we are promoting new research and writing on the West – both inside and outside academia -- by co-sponsoring the Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism , the Western Enterprise Reporting Fellowship, and Visiting Fellowships in Western Politics and Governance. We encourage you to explore our site to find out more about our approach to the past, present, and future of the North American West.
