Welcome to the Bill Lane Center for the American West
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
What is the Bill Lane Center?
Learn more about the founding of the Bill Lane Center, Stanford University's academic hub for regional study of western land and life.
What is the West?
Our definition of the American West is expansive and takes into account the many dimensions of the region, from those rooted in geography to those rooted in the cultural and literary imagination.
2025: The Year in Review
We look back on 2025, and on 20 years of sustaining the country's premier hub for teaching and scholarship on the American West.
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A milestone month for the Lane Center, November marked 20 years of tackling the American West’s big questions.
Since its founding two decades ago, the Bill Lane Center has become a thriving community of students and researchers who examine the American West in all its complexities.
To honor the West's past and sustain its future, Bill Lane Center students produce 15 new research projects
Projects explored a range of topics from water, housing, and transportation to the complex interplay of Western communities, identities and landscapes.
Honoring his extraordinary contributions to the American West, the Bill Lane Center bids “happy trails” to its director, Bruce Cain
For over a decade, Cain has been both envisioning and implementing programming that has solidified the Lane Center’s place as the premier hub for Western scholarship in the country. Cain is not retiring, but he has stepped down as faculty director.
New research on transitioning California to zero-emissions
Learn more about our recent paper on the progress and challenges in municipal fleet electrification under California’s Advanced Clean Fleet rule.
Working out West
Across the region, Bill Lane Center students will be working for organizations supporting Western land and life, in fields ranging from ecology to resource management to museum curation to public policy. This popular program lets students dip their toes into work opportunities that eventually become fulfilling careers.
Zephyr Frank appointed new faculty director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West
A professor of history and environmental social sciences at Stanford, Frank will transition into his role at the Lane Center on September 1, 2025.
The Bill Lane Center and Stanford University Libraries have acquired the California Historical Society Collection
The archive contains over 600,000 items dating back to the 18th century, including original artifacts from the Gold Rush and 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.
