Lecturer Search Courses

Courses and Teaching Expectations

The COLLEGE Lectureship is a teaching-based position within a first-year general education requirement program. Teaching in the COLLEGE program is highly collaborative. In fall and winter, there is a shared syllabus across the entire program and weekly small-group instructor meetings. In the spring quarter, faculty and lecturers work collaboratively on courses designed by the faculty. As a first-year requirement, we emphasize a student-centered pedagogic approach. Seminars are largely discussion-based, with up to 17 students, and lecturers offer multiple opportunities for one-on-one and small-group student meetings at key points in the quarter, as well as regular office hours. Lecturers also attend between 2 and 3 evening events every quarter that are part of the curriculum and intended for all first-year students ("frosh"), part of creating a shared intellectual experience for the first-year class. See Courses for more information.

Course Formats and Schedules

Lecturers teach in person and teaching is their primary responsibility. Lecturers teach two sections of the same course each quarter, in sections of about 17 students, and serve as the official instructor of record in all courses.

• "Why College? Your Education and the Good Life" and "Citizenship in the 21st Century" in Autumn and Winter are both discussion-based seminars in which the lecturer will meet with their section of 17 students twice a week for 80 minutes each session (3 units). Lecturers teach two sections, usually scheduled on the same days. All lecturers teach both "Why College?" and "Citizenship".
• All Spring Global Perspectives courses are designed by Stanford faculty. Each course team has between 3-5 lecturers who work collaboratively with one or two faculty. Spring courses may be either seminar format or a lecture-discussion section format. Lecturers frequently have a 4-day teaching schedule in spring quarter. 

The role of instructors in COLLEGE courses is primarily to facilitate student conversations, not to provide additional content. The courses focus on building the cognitive and communicative skills students need to get the most out of a residential learning experience, and to participate successfully in civic life.

In Your Application

Your cover letter should address how you might teach a single class session that engages the course materials provided in the course descriptions to first-year students in a discussion setting. We would like you to discuss at least two courses:  1) either "Why College?" or "Citizenship in the 21st Century" and 2) your top-ranked spring Global Perspectives courses. See course details below.

Autumn: Why College? Your Education and the Good Life | Multiple Faculty

What is the purpose of college? How is education related to the good life?

Some argue that the purpose of higher education is to train you for a career. Others claim that college is no longer necessary—that you can launch the next big startup and change the world without a degree. In the face of such critiques, this class makes a case for an expansive education that has traditionally been called “liberal education” (from the Latin word for freedom, libertas). Together we will explore the history, practice, and rationales for a liberal education by putting canonical texts in conversation with more recent works. We will consider the relevance of liberal education to all areas of study, from STEM to the arts, and its relations to future careers. And we will examine the central place that the idea of “the good life” has historically enjoyed in theories of liberal education.

In your cover letter: Please review the Why College? syllabus and choose a single day to describe how you might prepare and conduct an 80-minute discussion seminar. (Be sure to write either on Why College or Citizenship--there is no need to write on both.)

Winter: Citizenship in the 21st Century | Multiple Faculty

Who is (or ought to be) included in citizenship? Who gets to decide? What responsibilities come with citizenship? Is citizenship analogous to being a friend, a family member, a business partner?

Citizenship is not just what passport you hold or where you were born. Citizenship also means equal membership in a self-governing political community. We will explore some of the many debates about this ideal: How have people excluded from citizenship fought for, and sometimes won, inclusion? These debates have a long history, featuring in some of the earliest recorded philosophy and literature but also animating current political debates in the United States and elsewhere.

In your cover letter: Please review the Citizenship in the 21st Century syllabus and choose a single day to describe how you might prepare and conduct an 80-minute discussion seminar. (Be sure to write either on Why College or Citizenship--there is no need to write on both.)

Spring: Global Perspectives Courses

In your cover letter, be sure to discuss how you might teach one of the selected course materials listed under your top-ranked spring course, and rank your top two spring courses in Interfolio.

Courses listed below reflect preliminary plans for the next year, and are subject to change. You will also be asked to rank your top two spring courses in Interfolio.

Utopia, Dystopia, and Technology in Science Fiction | Ban Wang 

How can humans of diverse cultures harness technoscientific innovations while preserving humanist values and maintain a sustainable economy and civilization? How do narratives of utopia and dystopia depict the anthropocentric domination of nature and the exploitation of working classes through the misuse and abuse of technology? We live immersed in technology but are uncertain about where technology is taking us—to a dead end or a better place? 

Technology has helped create utopian visions of good society while plunging societies into dystopic nightmares.  Science and technology have been a universal path for all societies to join the modern world, but divergent cultures approach technoscientific modernity differently. The Enlightenment of the West conceives scientific modernity as emancipation from religion and superstition and as a power over nature. In overlapped and contrastive ways, the traditional Chinese worldviews incorporate technology into a sacred cosmos where humans use science and technology to stay in tune with Heaven and Earth. Today, technoscience discourse has become a dominant power and ideology. Technoscientific agendas are generating class disparity, eroding the social fabric, undermining the humanist traditions, and damaging nature and climate. Science fiction thinks about how science and technology transform human society, values, and everyday experiences in ways good or bad. By projecting both utopia and dystopia, sf reveals and critiques technology-induced social malaises and keeps hopes alive by projecting better futures, testifying to the ceaseless human potential for self-renewal in sustaining civilization on Earth. 

Selected Course Material: Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem; Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia; Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias. Films Avatar, dir. James Cameron; Wandering Earth, dir. Frant Gwo; Snowpiercer, dir. Bong joon-ho. 

The Spirit of Democracy | Larry Diamond & James Fishkin

What has led to the remarkable spread of democracy around the world? And why do freedom and democracy now appear to be receding in the world? How are the original debates on the design of constitutional democracy in the United States relevant to the current challenges it faces?

This course provides an overview of the aspirations and challenges of making democracy work. It analyzes competing visions of what democracy might be and how democracies actually function and decay, in the U.S. and around the world. We begin with the debate over the founding of America. Then we survey the “third wave” of global democratization around the world in the late 20th century and its more recent retrenchment. The problems of democratic reform are continuing and recurrent around the world. Democratic institutions are subject to a living dialogue, and we will engage in these debates as they involve both democratic theory and alternative institutional designs.

Selected Course Material: Robert Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution?; Larry Diamond, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency; James Fishkin, Democracy When the People Are Thinking; Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay; James Madison et al, The Federalist.

Living with Viruses | Julie Baker

What is a virus? How do viruses affect our lives? Does the virus make us distinctly human?

This course begins by considering our changing understanding of viruses and the continuing question of whether or not they are alive. Yet what is uncon­testable is that the billion-year war between cells and viruses has profoundly shaped our genomes and our world. Our own bodies are constituted by viruses and viral outbreaks have profoundly transformed popula­tions, landscapes, and basic social structures. Students do not need to have a background in biology but rather a willingness to think beyond conventional disciplinary distinctions to question how biology shapes human behavior (through outbreaks) as well as the potential of humans to shape biology (through genetic engineering). We will begin by exploring the diversity of viral species and the scientific and social responses to outbreaks, from HIV to Ebola to COVID-19.

Selected Course Material: And the Band Played On (film, dir. Roger Spottiswoode); Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation; Luis Villareal, “Are Viruses Alive?”; Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses.

Equity & Justice in Biotechnologies: Who Benefits and Who Is Left Behind | Nicole Martinez-Martin & Daphne Martschenko 

Who benefits from these advances in science and technology, and who is excluded? Is research and development in these areas proceeding in ways that are inclusive of diverse perspectives and populations? 

Advances in genomics, artificial intelligence and neurotechnologies are expected to transform biomedicine. Genomics has been applied to prenatal testing in order to screen for genetic disorders, improve cancer treatment, and diagnose rare disorders. Artificial intelligence has been applied to improving areas of healthcare such as diagnostic tests and developing potential medical treatments. Neurotechnologies have generated hopes of providing improved prosthetics or treatment for people with neurological and mental health disorders.  In this course, students will examine equity and justice in genomics, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology from a global perspective. We will discuss how the medical knowledge that builds and is generated by these biotechnologies reflects and may contribute to global inequities in healthcare outcomes. Students will explore these biotechnologies in a global context, applying ethical frameworks to assess justice and equity challenges, and examining models for their equitable and just development and use.

Selected Course Material: John Rawls, Two Principles of Justice; In Those Genes podcast, How the World Inherited Blackness; Lewis, D. (2024) Unethical studies on Chinese minority groups are being retracted—But not fast enough, critics say.; Murray, D.-S. (2023, November 29). Neuroscience has to grapple with a long legacy of racism if it wants to move into the future. STAT.; Mello, M. M., & Wolf, L. E. (2010). The Havasupai Indian Tribe Case—Lessons for Research Involving Stored Biologic Samples.

Global Capitals: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and People | Dan Edelstein

While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals?

Selected Course Material: Bourdieu, Forms of capital; Machiavelli, The Prince; Hernán Cortés, Second Letter; Montesquieu, Persian Letters; Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?; Sigmund Freud, On Negation; Brecht/Weill, The Three-Penny Opera

Making of the Modern World | Grant Parker & Jovana Lazic

Which features define the modern world as we know it? Which historical processes brought the global age into being? How new is it after all? 

This course addresses such questions, exploring human experience from global perspectives. It unfolds in three stages: firstly, establishing the frames of globalism and globalization, both in historical and contemporary contexts; secondly, surveying the historical transitions involved, including the two world wars of the twentieth century, their aftermath, and decolonization; thirdly, considering selected themes such as health, commodities and ecology. In each of these we’ll explore the interconnectedness of the local and the global. By the end we will have developed a sense of what global citizenship might mean. How might such thinking impact the future of humanity?

Selected Course Material: Gandhi, ‘Quit India’; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Hardt/Negri, Empire; Foer, Franklin, How Soccer Explains the World; Todorov, On Human Diversity.

Pox, Plague, and Pestilence: A Germ’s Eye View of Modernity | Kathryn Olivarius

Microscopic organisms have toppled empires, reshaped borders, and rewritten the course of human civilization. This course tells world history through the lens of disease, revealing how epidemics from the Black Death to HIV/AIDS have transformed societies, economies, and politics. Weaving together grand historical narratives with cutting-edge genetics, we will explore why humanity's uniquely dangerous disease pool runs deep in our evolutionary past—and how technological progress has accelerated its growth. Discover how pathogens drove the rise of agriculture, urbanization, slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, creating enduring patterns of wealth, power, and inequality that persist today. The course also examines humanity's remarkable escape from infectious disease—a triumph enabling modern life while destabilizing environments and fostering new threats. From ancient plagues to COVID-19, see how germs have both accelerated human progress and constantly pushed back against it. Human health is globally interdependent and inseparably connected to planetary well-being. How did we get here as a species—and where are we headed next?

Selected Course Material: Russell LaFayette Cecil (1881-1965) Textbook of Medicine