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Colloquia Series

Colloquia in the North American West

From 2002 to 2007, the Center hosted a regular lunchtime speakers’ series presenting the work of a diverse range of scholars, writers, and policy experts.  This series has been superseded by our special events series, conference speeches, and weekly faculty-student teas.  To join the mailing list for these events, please contact us westcentermail@stanford.edu.

Our past colloquia are listed below.

Winter Quarter 2007 

Climate Change and California Water
Tuesday, January 30th

Kat Snow, News Editor - KQED-FM

2006-2007 Western Enterprise Reporting Fellow

Scientists expect that as the earth's temperature warms, the salty seas will rise and seep into coastal aquifers and deltas, potentially contaminating the water supply. Rain and snow will fall at different times of the year and with different intensity than today, stretching the capacity of California's levees, reservoirs and pipelines. Snow will melt more quickly, threatening floods as water pours down the Sierra in the early spring, and drought as it filters from the mountains in the late summer. 

The warming trend in California is already well documented: the temperature of Lake Tahoe has risen one degree in 30 years; the water level in the San Francisco Bay has risen one foot in the last 150 years, and is expected to rise another 4 inches by 2050; spring runoff now gushes earlier as a greater portion of the snow pack melts before April.  The hydrological changes that accompany global warming are expected to be severe: beyond the capacity of California's current water infrastructure, practices and policies. 

Join Kat Snow, KQED News Editor and a Bill Lane Center Western Enterprise Reporting Fellow, for a conversation about how climate change could affect water in California and what the state's leaders and residents are - and are not - doing to prepare. 

Immigration and Immigrants’ Rights
Wednesday, February 21st 

Artur Domoslawski

Columnist - Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw, Poland

2006-2007 Western Enterprise Reporting Fellow

Sharks in the Sea of Cortez
Wednesday, March 21st

Juliet Eilperin

Staff reporter - The Washington Post

2006-2007 Western Enterprise Reporting Fellow
 

Spring Quarter 2007 

The Two-Generation Solution:  The Mechanics of Establishing American Indian Blood Quantum in the "Indian New Deal"
Wednesday, April 11th

James Oberly

Professor of History and American Indian Studies Program

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire 

As well as talks by: 

  • Angela Jamison, Department of Sociology, UCLA  
  • Dan Smith, Associate Professor, University of Florida 
  • Caroline Tolbert, Associate Professor, University of Iowa 
  • Ray Ring, Northern Rockies Editor for High Country News and Bill Lane Center Western Enterprise Reporting Fellow 

Watch this page for dates and topics. 

Autumn 2006

The All-American Canal and the Paradox of 'Efficiency':  Water and Politics at the US-Mexico Border
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 12 - 1:15

Matt Jenkins, West Coast Correspondent for High Country News

The All-American Canal is one of the West's most significant irrigation projects, bringing water from the Colorado River to the farmland of California's Imperial Valley.  Work is underway to pave the last earthen-lined portion of the Canal, saving California millions of gallons of water per year, but eliminating runoff from the Canal that benefits Mexican farmers just across the border.  Join Matt Jenkins, correspondent for High Country News and a Bill Lane Center Western Enterprise Reporting Fellow, to discuss this paradox and broader questions of water rights and border politics.

The Bill Lane Center's Western Enterprise Reporting Fellowships bring working journalists to Stanford for two weeks to research and write an article or broadcast series on topics of particular significance to the North American West.  For more about the program, visit http://west.stanford.edu.

Mapping the West: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns
Thursday, November 9
Peter J. Kastor, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University, St. Louis.

How do you describe a continent? In the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans struggled with this question as they sought to make sense of the shifting boundaries and populations of the North American West. This talk examines how American explorers, federal policymakers, and private publishers together attempted to make sense of the West through maps, treaties, and published travel accounts. It also examines how the worlds of policy, print, and visual culture developed together as Americans imagined a western future.

Spring 2006

The Other's Other's Other: Or How I Came to Appreciate the Complexity of Indigenous Memory Through the Crafting of Footnotes
Monday, April 10, 2006
Keith Thor Carlson, University of Saskatchewan

Samuel P. Huntington, the 'Hispanic Challenge,' and Another Failure of Intelligence

Wednesday, May 10, 2006
David Montejano, UC Berkeley

The Reel West: Making Documentary Films
Bill Lane Documentary Film Award Winners Colloquium

Tuesday May 30, 2006

The Bill Lane Center’s Documentary Film Award Winners will present their works in progress.  This noontime colloquium will feature a screening of Ashley Tindall’s film, “Feathers and Coins.”  Tindall’s documentary examines the impact of an Indian casino on a small New Mexican town. In addition, Erin Hudson and Kathy Huang will also discuss their films, “Long Haul,” and “Miss Chinatown USA.” 

Winter 2006

The Nature of Industrial Struggle in the Colorado Coalfields:  What Can Environmental History Reveal about Strikes and Massacres in Industrializing America?
Monday, January 23, 2006
Thomas Andrews, Cal State Northridge

Gendered Responses: 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Disaster Relief
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Andrea Davieshenderson, Research Associate, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University

Preserving Western Wilderness
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Andrew Gulliford, Fort Lewis College

How the West Was East: North America and the PacificBasin before 1850
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
David Igler, UC Irvine

Asian Exclusion in the Americas and the Pacific in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Centuries
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Erika Lee, University of Minnesota

Autumn 2005

Working Wilderness: The History of the Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range
October 25, 2005
Speaker: Nathan Sayre, Professor, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley
More information

Science, Activism, and Feathered Pigs: Conservation Biology and the California Condor
November 8, 2005
Speaker: Peter Alagona, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, UCLA
More information

Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the Transnational North American Frontier
December 7th, 2005
Andrew Graybill, University of Nebraska

Past Colloquia

Before They Went West: Engineers, Bureaucrats, and Developers in the Lower Mississippi Valley
May 18, 2005
Speaker: Christopher Morris, an Affiliate at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Taking Cover: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Destruction of Stanford University, and the Politics of Great Disasters
April 20, 2005
Speaker: Philip L. Fradkin, author of The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself

Salt Pond Restoration: What Role Should History Take?
March 30, 2005
Speaker: Laura A. Watt, Ph.D., Environmental Planner, EDAW, Inc.

Hidden in the Understory: Immigrant Labor & Forest Management in Southern Oregon
January 26, 2005
Speaker: Brinda Sarathy, Doctoral Candidate, UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Outlaw Women in the Nineteenth Century West
December 1, 2004
Speaker: Susan Wyle, Stanford Lecturer in the program on Writing and Rhetoric

Johnny Appleseed, John Wayne, and Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier
November 17, 2004
Speaker: Carl Abbott, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University

California and the West in the 2004 Presidential Election
May 27, 2004
Speaker: Bruce Cain, Director of Institute for Governmental Studies, Berkeley

Rephotographing the West
May 19, 2004
Speaker: Mark Klett, Arizona State University

Governing Cities in Transition: Local Policymakers React to Immigration and Change
March 3, 2004
Speakers: Paul Lewis and Karthick Ramakrishnan, Public Policy Institute of California
Co-sponsored by Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity

Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates: Public Access and Private Property in San Francisco Bay’s Tidal Wetlands
January 21, 2004
Speaker: Matthew Booker, Stanford University History Department

Nothing is Certain but Debt and Taxes: The Political Economy of Taxation during the California Gold Rush
December 3, 2003
Speaker: Mark Kanazawa, Carleton College Economics Department
Co-sponsored with Economics & Social Science History Institute Joint Seminar Social Science History/Science and Technology Workshop

Cultural Fires and Regenerations in Yosemite
October 22, 2003
Speaker: Rebecca Solnit, Independent Scholar and Author

The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West
June 11, 2003
Speaker: Stewart Udall. Former Secretary of the Interior
Co-sponsored with the Stanford Law School Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program

Nature, Community, & Contemporary Planning in the American West: A Lake Tahoe Case Study
May 28, 2003
Speaker: Michelle Sweeney, Nevada Tahoe Conservation District

Sabotage, ‘Jackass Tactics,’ Indeed!: Liberal Unionists, Wobblies, and Rethinking Rocky Mountain Labor Radicalism, 1890-1912
April 30, 2003
Speaker: John Enyeart, Stanford University History Department

The Irish-American West: A Hypertext Corpus of Texts and Research
March 12, 2003
Speaker: Matthew Jockers, Stanford University English Department

Writing the Range of the American West
February 26, 2003
Speaker: Jon Christensen, Knight Professional Journalism Fellow




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