The Bill Lane Center for the American West

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

Our Mission

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.

Our Origins

A map of the United States west of the 100th meridian

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.

Defining the West

Hands of journalists scribble in reporters' notebooks

The Bill Lane Center will begin accepting applications for its 2025 Western Media Fellowship

Our Media Fellowship underwrites a journalist examining the American West with a $7,500 stipend for three to six months' work. Applications are due October 14, 2024.

Learn more and apply

Small, old boats docked near the muddy shore of a remote Alaskan city

Hooper Bay, Alaska in August of 2002. Photo by CTLiotta via Wikimedia Commons.

In a remote Alaskan city with the nation's highest suicide rates, community-based prevention heals

Brandon Kapelow, our 2024 western media fellow, reports on NPR's Morning Edition about Alaska Native communities who have partnered with researchers to address suicide prevention by building on community strengths, rather than treating individual risks.

Read the story

Meet our 2024 "West" interns

Every summer, we offer undergraduate internships at organizations throughout the West. These work opportunities allow students to explore careers in natural history, conservation, ecology, land use, museum curation, resource management, water, energy, literature, policy, politics, and more.

Meet the 2024 Interns

Dry Arizona desert terrain under a bright blue sky

Photo by @thematthoward on Unsplash

Annual Rural West Conference addresses the Colorado River crisis and more

Stanford News offers coverage of our annual Rural West Conference, which took place March 27 in Tempe, Arizona. The future of water and other issues facing the rural Southwest were top of mind.

Read the article

Kate Gibson discusses all things Bill Lane Center on KZSU

What is the Bill Lane Center and who do we serve? Jon Cousins interviews Bill Lane Center Associate Director Kate Gibson on "The Great British Breakfast" show.

Listen to the interview

A true crime podcast that investigates … true crime podcasts

In a research project for the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Grace Carroll and Kyleigh McPeek interviewed dozens of sources including scholars, journalists, and relatives of victims to find out how true crime media impacts the crimes they cover.

Sunrise view from the cemetery in Mountain Village, a community in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Photo by Brandon Kapelow.

In a remote Alaskan city with the nation's highest suicide rates, community-based prevention heals

On NPR's Morning Edition, our 2023 Western Media Fellow Brandon Kapelow reports on a community-based suicide prevention program in the remote Alaskan city of Hooper Bay.

Articles worth reading: September 3, 2024

The difficulty in collecting data on heat deaths; Utah’s legal attack on federal ownership of public lands in the state; Canadian wildfires last year released more carbon than all but three countries; new challenges as the Wilderness Act turns 60; trucking grizzly pairs around the mountain West; and other environmental stories from around the region.