Bill Lane Center for the American West course, 2024-25 Teaching Assistant position

The Bill Lane Center for the American West offers an annual course, The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A) for which teaching assistants are needed.

The course will meet TBD in spring quarter of the 2024-25 academic year. 
 
There is high student interest and enrollment (usually about 100 undergraduates). The Bill Lane Center is looking for two to three graduate students interested in a 50% TAship which is approximately 20 hours per week.

The compensation for a 50% TAship is a salary dictated by the student's department and TAL (tuition allowance) for the position which covers 8-10 units. The 2023-24 Stanford minimum salary range is attached below. 

The Bill Lane Center seeks a diversity of academic backgrounds among the TAs and they are expected to comprehend and teach across different disciplines.

The teaching assistants (TAs) are expected to:

• Attend all in-person course lectures.
• Assist faculty with classroom technology needs.
• Lead two sections with 15+ students and two weekly discussions.
• Hold weekly office hours.
• Complete the course readings.
• Mentor and support students.
• Work with students and help them with their written assignments.
• Work on an interdisciplinary TA and faculty team and with students from diverse majors.
• Comprehend course material and teach across different disciplines.
• Assign grades.

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course 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. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.

Faculty:

Bruce Cain, Political Science
Spence and Cleone Eccles Family Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West; Charles Louis Ducommun Professor in Humanities and Sciences, Stanford
Bruce Cain holds appointments at Stanford’s Political Science Department and in the Doerr School of Sustainability. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has received the Richard F. Fenno Prize for research, teaching awards from Caltech and UC Berkeley, and the Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities; Professor of English; Director of American Studies, Stanford
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the author, editor, or co-editor of 48 books, including Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee and The Chinese and the Iron Road. She is also the author of over 150 articles, essays, and reviews, many focusing on American literature and social justice. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of The New York Times.

David Freyberg, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford
David Freyberg has been on the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford since 1981. His teaching and research range broadly across hydrology and water resources, including international watershed collaborations, the exchange of water between reservoirs and their trapped sediments, and the spatial scaling of wastewater resource recovery in urban environments. He maintains a strong interest in water resources development, policy, and history, particularly in the American West.

David M. Kennedy, History
Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus; Founding Faculty Director, Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford
David M. Kennedy has long taught courses in the history of the 20th-century United States, US foreign policy, American literature, and the history of the North American West. His book Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 recounts the history of the American people in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, both of which deeply shaped the Western region.

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 four 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. To this end, teachers and students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region, such as: time and space, water, fire, and energy, peoples, borders, boom and bust cycles, and policy challenges.

Course Objectives
This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of western North America—its history, physical geography, climate, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges, as well as its artistic and cultural expression of people in the region.
The course will examine how the West came to be ultimately viewed as distinctive. Students will understand how geology, topography, and climate—aridity in particular—have shaped the region’s history, development and public policies. Aridity accounts in part for the fact that the federal government is the region’s largest landlord, controlling more than 50 percent of the West’s surface area. In addition, Western governance is complicated and distinctively shaped by its populist culture, direct democracy options, and highly fractured system of local jurisdictions. Direct democracy, for instance, enables more innovative programs to manage climate change and the environment, but the dispersion of jurisdictional responsibilities makes it harder to implement them.

Students will also examine transformations in the West’s demography and its economy. The West has been the nation’s most demographically dynamic region since World War II. Massive wartime and postwar internal migration has given way in recent decades to transnational migration, notably from Mexico and Asia. And the West is home to a majority of the nation’s Native Americans. Migration, of course, closely tracks economic patterns. The transformation of the West from a natural resource extraction economy to a high-tech economy—with Silicon Valley its exemplar and locomotive—will be another course theme, as will the policy issues attending the prospects for the West’s environmental, demographic, and economic future. Participating in vigorous analytical discussions and writing papers on western trends, students will be able to analyze westerners’ behavior and western social organizations using data or primary source material.

The course will also examine the long tradition of rendering and expressing the West in art, film, and literature. In addition to analyzing poems, essays, short stories, and excerpts from longer works, the course will focus on paintings, photography, sculpture, and prints of the American West. The goal is for students to understand that these various accounts are not illustrations of the West but rather inventions that suited the ideological needs of particular moments. The portrayal of western peoples differed from one period to the next, and the same is true for borders, water, and the landscape itself. At the same time, the goal is to note how the works we study can—sometimes—introduce us to states of feeling not easily categorizable by recourse to social or ideological explanations.

Course requirements
Students are responsible for attending all lectures and sections for this course. Modules in Canvas will help them navigate their way through the course. All materials for the week will be released the prior Friday. These materials will include all the readings associated with a specific lecture and required viewing videos. 

Students are expected to:

• Attend all in-person course lectures
• Participate in section discussions
• Attend two events (listed in syllabus), and 
• Complete the course readings in order to receive credit for this class. 
• Students will also have written assignments to complete.