The American West Course

The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate course taught by a distinguished group of five scholars from different departments and two different schools. It integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy and continuing policy challenges. 

Core to the curriculum is the belief that the West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. Faculty and students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region, such as time and space, resources, resilience, water, fire, and energy, climate, peoples, borders, and policy challenges.

The course fulfills WAY-A-II and WAY-SI requirements and 5 units. 

Faculty:

• Bruce Cain, Political Science
• Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
• David Freyberg, Civil and Environmental Engineering
• David M. Kennedy, History
• Alexander Nemerov, Art History

The course will be offered in Spring Quarter during the 2025-26 academic year on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am to 11:50am in room 002 in the Lane History Corner (building 200). 

Spring Quarter 2025-26 American West course syllabus (working draft). 

Read more about the American West course
Stanford Magazine: Mythbusting the American West
Stanford Humanities: Stanford course aims to cultivate future leaders of the American West

Bruce Cain

Bruce E. Cain is a professor of Political Science at Stanford University and former director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a PhD from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and executive director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech 1988 and UC Berkeley 2003) and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000). His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics. 

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice. Much of her work has focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. 

Fisher Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the challenge of doing transnational American Studies; the place of humor and satire in movements for social change; the role literature can play in the fight against racism; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare;  the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; American theatre history; and the development of feminist criticism.

David Freyberg

David Freyberg is professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, emeritus. A hydrologist and water resources specialist, Freyberg studies reservoir sedimentation and hydrology; surface water-ground water interactions, especially in reservoir/sediment systems; collaborative governance of trans-national water resources; and the design, scaling, and spatial structure of recycled water systems.
 

David M. Kennedy

A founding co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, David Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus. Professor Kennedy received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2000 for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War.

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history.

Alexander Nemerov

Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities. A distinguished scholar of American culture, Alexander Nemerov explores our connection to the past and the power of the humanities to shape our lives. Through his empathetic, intuitive research and close readings of history, philosophy, and poetry, Nemerov reveals art as a source of emotional truth and considers its ethical demands upon us in our moment. 

An instinctive, nuanced author, Nemerov’s most recent book is The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s presenting tales of a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. Previous titles by Nemerov have gained further recognition: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography; Summoning Pearl Harbor, was praised by the novelist Ali Smith as "a unifying and liberating meditation”; Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine, was short-listed for the Marfield Prize, a national award in arts writing; Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov, a meditation on his father, the poet Howard Nemerov and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus, was published in 2015; Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s was named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013; Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton and 1940s America was praised by The New York Review of Books as "superbly original." Nemerov's first two books are The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.

After receiving his B.A. in Art History and English with Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, Nemerov began his teaching career at Stanford University in 1992. Returning to Yale in 2001, Nemerov chaired the Department of the History of Art from 2009 to 2012 and in 2010 was named to the Vincent Scully Professorship. Nemerov returned to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021. The Stanford Daily has named him one of the university's top ten professors.